The roots of reading comprehension: Evaluating the effectiveness of teaching narrative comprehension strategies to beginning readers.

Despite the importance of narrative for young children and for early reading, there is little scientific and instructional research on the narrative genre among beginning readers. There is also a need for greater emphases on comprehension in primary grades, both in reading assessment and instruction. Previous research created and tested comprehension assessments that do not depend on decoding so that researchers can examine young children's comprehension development. The assessments also help teachers to identify and address comprehension difficulties prior to and simultaneous with the assessment of code-related skills (Paris & Paris, 2003). This research is a classroom-based intervention designed to increase narrative comprehension skills in first graders. In a pre/post quasi-experimental design, 123 children in six classrooms were administered a battery of innovative wordless comprehension tasks in the narrative and expository genres. Ten lessons were delivered over five weeks in four experimental classrooms about comprehension strategies specific to the narrative genre. Children learned strategies that promoted story structure knowledge, retelling skills, predictions, and inferences about characters' internal responses, dialogue, and theme. The lessons emphasized metacognitive discussion and guided practice; decoding demands were also minimized. Two control classrooms received instruction on language development and poetry to ensure equal time and exposure to motivating language arts activities. Lessons in both conditions utilized similar types of activities and grouping practices so that instruction in both conditions was grounded in developmentally appropriate activities and materials. Repeated measures MANOVAS were performed to test the benefits of the intervention at post-test. Results showed that the intervention benefited children's comprehension of narrative picture books. Children who received the narrative instruction also showed improvements in narrative skills in listening comprehension and oral production modalities. The effects of the intervention did not, however, generalize to picture viewing, oral production, or listening comprehension tasks in the expository genre. Furthermore, analyses revealed no interactions with the treatment by initial skill level, suggesting that all children benefited from the instruction regardless of decoding, comprehension, or oral language skills. This research demonstrated effective methods and materials to assess and enhance comprehension in young children in ways that can be implemented directly by classroom teachers.PhDDevelopmental psychologyEducationEducational psychologyPsychologyReading instructionUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123665/2/3096166.pd