Chapter published in:
Narrative, Literacy and Other Skills: Studies in intervention
Edited by Edy Veneziano and Ageliki Nicolopoulou
[Studies in Narrative 25] 2019
► pp. 89–107

Do children’s oral retellings of narrative and informational texts predict scores on a standardized reading comprehension test?

| Harvard Graduate School of Education
| Harvard Graduate School of Education
| Harvard Graduate School of Education
| Harvard Graduate School of Education
| Harvard Graduate School of Education
This study assesses whether oral retellings of a narrative and informational text during the summer following third grade predicted performance on reading comprehension in the fall of fourth grade. To assess comprehension of a narrative and an informational text, 52 teachers called 117 third-grade students over the summer and asked them to provide an oral retelling of two books. All students were participating in a summer literacy intervention called READS for Summer Learning (READS). Oral retellings of narrative and informational books from the READS lessons were analyzed using content units, or individual units of meaning, from the books. We found that the percentage of total content units recalled on the narrative text was a predictor of narrative comprehension subtest scores, while the percentage of content units recalled on the informational text was not a significant predictor of informational comprehension subtest scores. This study lends further empirical evidence to the link between oral retellings of narrative texts and later reading comprehension and extends prior research by examining the possible link between both informational oral discourse skills and reading skills.
Keywords: retelling, reading comprehension, oral narrative, story recall
Published online: 06 May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.25.04kin
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