Improving Students’ Narrative Comprehension through a Multiple Strategy Approach : Effects of Dialogic Strategy Instruction in Secondary School

This article reports on an intervention study using a multiple strategy approach – called Dialogic Strategy Instruction (DSI) – to improve seventh grade students’ narrative comprehension in terms of students’ ability to generate inferences and develop interpretations of characters and events. DSI combines strat-egy instruction with dialogical principles for classroom discussion and response writing. After a 13-week intervention period, students in the intervention condition demonstrated significant improvement in generating inferences and interpretations compared to pre-test results. However, the average effect was small and the improvement was not significantly different relative to controls. An analysis of stu-dents with low pre-test scores showed that the intervention group had made significant and strong improvement relative to controls. Results for middle and high achievers were non-significant in this respect. Therefore, although DSI appears valuable for low achievers, results indicate that the instruc-tional principles implemented may not offer instructional support for all children. Possible reasons for the absence of a general effect are discussed and directions for future research are suggested