A Study of the Effects of Narrative Interventions on Story Retelling Among junior Middle School Students文献综述

 2022-08-29 10:08

2. Literary review

2.1 Narratives

2.1.1 The Concept of Narratives

Narratives are defined as utterance productions about an event, story or experience, which served as a natural and untrained way for people to remember and convey information (Hughes amp; Schmidek, 1997). In other words, narratives are the descriptions of some events or stories in a logical and temporal order, which always consist of characters, acts, emotions and plots. Narratives are made of a chain of events that happened in a certain time frame by characters.

Unlike dialogues or conversations, narratives are monologues which make a high demand of peoplersquo;s language ability to convey information while others act as listeners offering lesser information and expressions. It combines familiar dialogue with decontextualized literate language features. As a consequence, narratives ask narrators to use complex, descriptive language (Petersen, 2011).

2.1.2 The Importance of Narratives

Based on the general concept of narratives, it is not surprising to find its importance in childrenrsquo;s academic achievement and literacy development. According to preview research on this area, the author concluded the importance of narrative in three aspects.

First, since it places a high demand of the complexity of language, in school environment it can be used as a good method to introduce, lead in and practice complex languages. And sometimes it is also a natural way for teacher to target language difficulties.

Second, Numerous researches have indicated that oral language skills play a critical role in developing literacy skills by laying a solid foundation for literacy development(Van Kleeck, 1990; Cabell et al., 2009). And this effect is more remarkable in younger learners, especially in those pre-school children with language impairment (Welsch et al., 2003). Since narratives bridge the oral languages and literate languages. Researches have proved that early narrative ability can predicts later literacy skills (Boudreau, 2008). Wellman and Lewis (2011) used a longitudinal, cohort design to determine whether early narrative ability predicts school-aged childrenrsquo;s literacy skills. Participants of this research were younger children without literacy instruction at the age from 3 to 6 years old. Totally, 60 children from the greater Cleveland area were enrolled in the research. 20 children had isolated speech sound disorders. 20 children had with combined speech sound disorders and language impairment. And the rest of the children were typically developing children. In order to examine the relationship between early narrative ability with later literacy skills, plenty of regression analyses were conducted among the whole children (n=60). The dependent measures were included the Word Identification and Word Attack subtest of the WRMT, the Reading Comprehension subtest of the WIAT, and the composite score of the TOWL. After the experiment, research results gave the answer that narrative retelling is a useful task for predicting childrenrsquo;s later literacy problems. On the one hand, narrative macrostructure plays a critical role in later literacy development as the predictors of the decoding of reading comprehension and written language. On the other hand, narrative microstructure has an effect on decoding of nonsense words (Wellman et al., 2011).

Thirdly, there were a lot of researches showed that narratives have an effect on young childrenrsquo;s later academic success, especially for those pre-reader children with language impairments (Westerveld and Gillon, 2010; Petersen, 2011; Brown et al., 2014). Adlof and McLeod (2014) tested the effectiveness of structured narrative retell instruction for improving meaning-related knowledge and skills. 9 kindergarten students aged 49–82 months from low socioeconomic backgrounds families were divided into two groups in their research. One group used structure narrative retelling instruction (n=4), and focused on story grammar components. While the other group (n=5), as control group, used Code-Focused Literacy Instruction (CFLI), and emphasized sounds and letters. All the participants received intervention program in 40-min small group sessions twice a week. And this experiment lasted 6 weeks. Both of groups used childrenrsquo;s story books with a series of interactions. However, different groups focused on the different topics during the interactions. The following things were measured in both two groups: vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension, narrative macrostructure and microstructure in both pre-test and post-test. Finally, the result showed that children receiving SNRI instruction would be more likely to grasp meaning-related knowledge and develop literacy skills (Adlof et al., 2014). Researches on this topic in school-aged, normal children are very limited. But, there still were some evidences showed that narratives are also effective to develop reading skills in older children without language disorder (Shanahan et al., 2010). However, it is on an emerging stage and still need further researches to provide more reliable and accurate evidences.

2.1.3 The Narrative Macrostructure

The structure of narrative discourse was been classified into two categories based on the levels of organization of representing information. The first one is often used in school environment, the macro level. Narrative macrostructure is a framework which focuses on active and obvious elements in narratives and follows a story grammar organization. General speaking, story grammar components are logical elements that offer the major plots and typical features of the story (Dimino, 1995). It consists of initiating event, internal response or emotion, action and consequence. And basically, some of these story grammar components, such as initiating events, responses and consequences form a minimally complete narrative episode (Peterson amp; McCabe, 1983). Macrostructural complexity, which is indicated by the story grammar components and narrative episode, influences narrative proficiency to a certain degree (Spencer and Slocum, 2010).

2.1.4 The Narrative Microstructure

The second one is the micro level, which emphasizes on the words, sentences, and logical relationship between sentences. In other words, the micro level, unlike macro level which focuses on the textual knowledge, pays attention to the linguistic knowledge including grammar, syntactic knowledge, morphology and lexical knowledge (Leikin et al., 2014). Therefore, the use of causal and temporal subordinating conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions adverbs and other literate languages are often measured when it comes to narrative microstructure. However, in many researches, the number of utterances, total number of words, mean length of utterance, and number of different words, as products of narratives are also assessed in the term of narrative microstructure (Petersen et al., 2010).

2.2 Narrative Intervention

2.2.1 The Concept of Narrative Intervention

Narrative intervention is an intervention procedure, which is used as a medium or scaffolding offered by the clinician to help participants to product certain language as it is demanded. Besides, in school environment, educational intervention is quiet critical, since it can help students take part in their study more actively; and it also plays a significant role in improving studentsrsquo; self-management capacity and self-efficacy (Schaepe and Bergjan, 2015).

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