Promoting Narrative Comprehension Skills in At-Risk Children: How does teacher-child interaction matter?

• In Event: The Powerful Role of Adaptive Expertise in Scaffolding Story Comprehension Skills in Young Children

Abstract

Objectives
This intervention study explores the effects of narrative dialogic reading on 4-year-old at-risk children’s narrative comprehension and its connection to the quality of learning interaction based on the Teaching through Interaction (Hamre et al., 2013) framework. This provides insights to advance the pedagogy of Early Childhood Education and Care.

Theoretical Framework
While dialogic reading has been demonstrated to support children’s foundational language skills (Mol et al., 2009), limited research has examined its impact on the children’s narrative comprehension skills (Grolig et al., 2020), particularly among children at risk for language development difficulties (Lonigan et al., 2013). Intervention programs including professional development for teachers are essential to enhance the quality of learning interaction (Girolametto et al., 2003; Kajamies et al., 2019) which, in turn, contributes to children’s narrative comprehension skills such as memory for story and inference-making. Previous research suggests that children are responsive to explicit teaching of narrative comprehension strategies (Paris & Paris, 2007).

Methods
Children’s narrative comprehension skills were assessed through tests of wordless narrative picture book comprehension and listening comprehension at four measurement points during the intervention including one follow-up assessment six months after the intervention.

Children’s responsiveness to narrative dialogic reading was analyzed using hierarchical mixed modeling in R. The quality of teacher-child interaction will be assessed with CLASS observation tool (Pianta et al., 2008) from videos recorded during the intervention. The potential links between the quality of learning interaction in dyads’ and the children’s gains in narrative comprehension will be analyzed using Mplus.

Data
The data consist of intervention and control groups from one-year intervention program, which included professional development sessions for 21 teachers in the intervention group. Pretest assessments identified 92 Finnish-speaking children, who scored below-average on listening comprehension at age 4. Half of them were assigned to the intervention group as dyads (n = 23) participating in 20 narrative dialogic reading sessions, while the other half formed the control group, continuing their conventional reading.

Results
Our results indicate that narrative dialogic reading statistically significantly improved pictorial narrative comprehension scores for at-risk children at the posttest (p < .001) and follow-up assessment (p < .001) compared to the control group (see Figure 1). Additionally, at-risk children’s listening comprehension showed significant improvement at the posttest (p < .01) compared to the children in control group. However, this effect diminished by the follow-up assessment. The analysis of the quality of teacher-child learning interaction among the children in the intervention group and its connection to the evolving narrative comprehension skills will be reported in the presentation.

Scientific significance of the study
The proportion of poor narrative comprehenders decreased during the intervention, demonstrating the effectiveness of narrative dialogic reading in promoting at-risk children’s narrative comprehension assessed through visual and auditory learning modalities. Addressing individual language comprehension difficulties in early childhood is essential for later school achievement (Silva & Cain, 2015).

Authors

• Tiia Lindfors, University of Turku

• Anu Kajamies, University of Turku

• Anne Sorariutta, University of Turku

• Mikko Havisto, University of Turku

• Aino Mattinen, University of Turku

• Janne Lepola, U.S. Department of Education