Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners' oral narrative construction

Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such

routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge,

however, has not been clearly established. The present research tested whether an 8-week

shared-reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal

education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning

techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize

elements of story knowledge. Forty English-speaking five- and six-year-olds were assigned to

either the dialogic-reading or an alternative-treatment group. ANCOVA results found that the

dialogic-reading children’s post-test narratives were significantly better on structure and context

measures than those for the alternative-treatment children, but results differed for produced or

retold narratives. The dialogic-reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains.

Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction

knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.