Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders

This study provided 5 weeks of direct strategy instruction about narrative elements and relations in 4 first-grade classrooms (n = 83), all with materials that made minimal decoding demands on children's reading. Two comparison classrooms (n = 40) received comparable instruction on language development and poetry. A battery of assessments given at pretest and posttest showed that the intervention benefited children's comprehension of narratives in the "picture-viewing" modality as well as narrative meaning-making in "listening comprehension" and "oral production" modalities. Understanding and recall of main narrative elements improved, as did inference-making skills and understanding the psychological aspects of stories. Implications for enhancing beginning readers' emerging narrative knowledge in primary grade classrooms are discussed. (Contains 6 tables and 1 figure. Appended are: (1) Means, Standard Deviations, and Repeated Measures Analysis of Covariance Results for All Narrative Comprehension and Expository Comprehension Task Measures by Narrative Strategy Instruction and Comparison Conditions; and (2) Means, Standard Deviations, and Analysis of Covariance Results for All Narrative Production and Expository Production Task Measures for Narrative Strategy Instruction (n = 41) and Comparison (n = 22) Conditions.)