Oral narratives, dialogical intervention and reading comprehension: A study of 5-to-8 years old French children.

The acquisition of narrative skills is a developmental process that spans several years. Although children as young as 4-5 years can produce descriptive narratives, they have difficulties to produce coherent and causally-motivated plots. Previous studies have shown that from 6-7 years on, children produce more coherently structured and mind-oriented narratives after participating in conversations that solicit children's attention on the reasons of the events of the story. We believe that promoting narrative skills is not only an important achievement in itself but also a useful approach for improving children's reading comprehension, more useful then concentrating on lower level units of written text like phonological awareness or letters. The aim of this study is to present the progression of children's oral narratives in the construction of a story from a set of pictures and in the recall of a story read by the experimenter, and how such a progression relates to measures of emergent reading and writing skills and to two theory of mind tasks. To this effect, 100 children between the ages of 5 to 8 (25 children per age group) participated in the different phases of the study. Preliminary results show that the dialogical intervention procedure promotes in some children more structured and evaluative narratives, a progression that correlates with children's emergent reading and writing measures. These results confirm the importance of the conversational intervention procedure for improving narratives and its usefulness as an evaluative tool for understanding the relation between oral narratives and reading comprehension