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Purpose: The primary aim of the present study was to examine whether different ways of presenting narrative stimuli (i.e., live narrative stimuli versus audio-recorded narrative stimuli) influence children's performances on narrative comprehension and oral-retell quality.
Method: Children in kindergarten (n = 54), second grade (n = 74), and fourth grade (n = 65) were matched on their performance on a standardized oral-language comprehension task and then were randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 conditions that differed in how narrative stimuli were presented to children: live narrative stimuli and audio-recorded narrative stimuli.
Results: Kindergartners and 2nd graders in the live condition had higher mean performance on narrative comprehension, with effect sizes of .43 and .39, respectively, after accounting for age, gender, and school. No differences were found in narrative comprehension for children in 4th grade. Children's oral-retell quality did not differ as a function of condition in any grade.
Conclusion: These results suggest that how narrative stimuli are presented to children (i.e., live versus audiorecorded narrative stimuli) may affect children's narrative comprehension, particularly for young children in kindergarten and Grade 2. Implications for assessment and instruction are discussed.
Narrative skills, including comprehension and production (and retell), are critical to daily interactional demands in the classroom (Snow, 1983, 1991; Westerveld & Gillon, 2010). Narrative comprehension, and retell and production,1 are also strongly related to literacy skills such as reading comprehension (Dickinson & Porche, 2011; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009; Kim, 2015b; Tabors, Snow, & Dickinson, 2001) and writing (e.g., Berninger & Abbott, 2010; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Kim, 2015a; Kim, Al Otaiba, Wanzek, & Gatlin, 2015). It is unsurprising that the Common Core State Standards (2010), implemented by many states in the United States, explicitly state expectations on children's narrative skills even in kindergarten. Moreover, recent efforts in narrative assessment have provided useful evaluation tools for children of various ages. Justice, Bowles, Pence, and Gosse (2010) developed the Narrative Assessment Protocol, which assesses the microstructure of children's narrative samples. Petersen, Gillam, and Gillam (2008) also developed a scoring system called the Index of Narrative Complexity, which evaluates the macroand microstructure of narrative samples for progressmonitoring purposes.
Given the importance to academic success and increased attention to narrative...