Effects Of Story Presentation Methods On Story-retelling And Story Comprehension Of Preschool Children

Story-retell and narrative comprehension are strongly related to the literacy skills of preschool children.Previous studies have shown that the story presentation methods effect children's narrative competence.The primary aim of the present study was to examine whether different ways of presenting narrative stimuli(i.e.video stimuli versus combined audio and pictures narrative stimuli)influence children's performances on narrative comprehension and story-retell.Methods: The subjects of this study were children in kindergarten separated into three groups based on age(n=90): the young group(n=29);the middle group(n=30);the older group(n=31).This experiment was designed so that each participant was assigned to two conditions that differed in how stories were presented to children.Results: In the aspect of story-retell:(1)Group and story presentation methods had significant interaction effects.The older group children under the video condition had higher mean performance on story-retell than children in combined audio and pictures condition,while no significant difference was found for the two conditions for children in the younger and middle groups.(2)Kindergartners' performance of story-retell increased significantly with age.In the aspect of narrative comprehension:(1)all children in the video condition trial had higher mean performance on narrative comprehension than the children in the combined audio and pictures trial.(2)Middle age group children had higher mean performance on narrative comprehension than younger group children.No significant difference was found in narrative comprehension for children in the middle and older age groupings.