Contribution of oral narrative skills to word reading, sentence and passage reading comprehension in Chinese first graders

Purpose: This study investigated the connection between oral narrative and literacy skills in Chinese children. Method: Ninety-one Chinese first-graders were assessed on oral narrative skills with three measures (narrative recall, narrative comprehension, and anomaly detection). Results: Results of hierarchical regression analysis showed that children's performance in narrative comprehension significantly accounted for variance in both word reading and sentence reading comprehension, independent of vocabulary and morphosyntatic skills. In the prediction of passage reading comprehension, both narrative recall and anomaly detection made unique contribution when children's working memory, vocabulary, morphosyntatic skills, as well as their word reading and sentence reading comprehension abilities were controlled. Conclusions: To conclude, these findings supported the importance of oral narrative skills to early Chinese literacy development. They also showed how different kinds of narrative skills might contribute to different aspects of reading ability. While children's general listening comprehension ability might be important for lower-level reading, it appears that passage-level reading comprehension might distinctively requires specific discourse skills (e.g., narrative structuring and comprehension monitoring), even at the beginning stage of reading comprehension development. Copyright © 2013 Twentieth Annual Meeting of Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.