A systematic review of observational studies relating narrative ability to reading comprehension

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Literacy is crucial to academic success, but reading comprehension is a challenge for many school-age children. Narrative ability is also important, especially within the Common Core, but has received special attention for its putative link to literacy. Facility with narrative requires use of the same kind of decontextualized language found in text (e.g., Petersen, Gillam, Spencer, & Gillam, 2010), and familiarity with conventional narrative elements (i.e., macrostructure or story grammar) may make it easier to understand stories (Stetter & Hughes, 2010). There appears to be conflicting evidence to support a narrative-reading comprehension link, likely driven (at least in part) by treating narrative ability as a single construct vs. a complex skill subserved by disparate component skills. This systematic review seeks to evaluate the strength of the evidence linking disparate aspects of narrative ability to reading comprehension, with particular interest in observational studies identifying relative contributions of macrostructure and narrative microstructure to reading ability in the expressive narratives of U.S. school-age children (experimental studies are reviewed separately). It is hypothesized that narrative macrostructure, but not microstructure, will show the clearest relationship to reading comprehension.
The initial search was conducted for peer-reviewed journal articles written in English and published between 1980 and 2020. Searches were conducted in a variety of databases. Boolean logic was used to combine search terms with AND and to include variations of a root with an asterisk (e.g., narrative* to include singular and plural forms). The search terms were “narrative* AND ‘reading comprehension’ AND child*” and “‘story grammar’ AND ‘reading comprehension’ AND child*.” Additional studies were identified by examining the references in studies that met inclusion criteria and the references of relevant reviews that were revealed in the search. The search results were uploaded to the Rayyan web-based application for systematic reviews (Ouzzani, Hammady, Fedorowicz, & Elmagarmid, 2016) for coding and removal of duplicates.
A total of 3,937 articles were identified from the original search, 1,027 of which were duplicates. Titles and abstracts of the remaining 2,910 articles were screened and 203 articles were read to determine eligibility; 32 of these were identified as observational studies that met criteria. Studies of narrative macrostructure showed a clear and consistent relationship with reading comprehension. The relationship was less clear with narrative microstructure, as some studies found a link, some found no link, and a few found a negative association between microstructure and reading (that is, poorer readers used more microstructure in their narratives). Thus, support for the hypothesis was found, with evidence that it is narrative macrostructure in particular that supports reading comprehension, in contrast to narrative microstructure. The results will be compared to the second phase of the review (focused on experimental studies) and implications for speech-language pathologists and other educational staff are discussed.

Author

• Darin Woolpert, California State University - San Marcos
  Presenting Author