Leveraging storybook reading to prompt young children’s narrative development: A naturalistic observation on a 3-year-old girl

Background: Narrative skills are one of the critical early literacy skills. To guide future reading interventions and pedagogies, this study explored the ways to support young children’s narrative development via scaffolding their storybook reading in the case of the Chinese.

Method: A 1.5-year naturalistic observation was conducted with a typically developing, Mandarin Chinese-speaking girl from her entry to K1 (3-year-old) until the end of the first semester of K2 (4.5-year-old). She comes from a middle-class family in a middle-sized city in Southern China. The observation was carried out during her playtime in the reading corner in her kindergarten weekly. In the first sessions, she freely explored storybooks; gradually, she expressed motivation to read about dinosaurs.

The teacher engaged with the child and provided her with appropriate dinosaur-themed storybooks (N = 45) based on her sustained interests and stages of narrative development. The child’s narratives about dinosaurs after storybook reading were recorded as indicators of narrative development. The teacher’s observation diaries were also recorded to document the strategies they used. All transcripts (N = 93) were coded in Nvivo, and the data were analyzed qualitatively.

Results: Results point out the effective strategies applied by the teacher in different stages of the child’s narrative development (i.e., the early, medium, and late stages). The characteristics of storybooks that the child read were synthesized regarding how they facilitate the child’s narrative development and maintain her reading motivation. In sum, our findings provide fruitful implications for future efforts to promote young children’s narrative development and emergent literacy. Copyright © 2023 by Association for Reading and Writing in Asia.