The Effects of Story Retelling on Kindergarten Children's Listening Comprehension

Abstract

Nineteen kindergarten children from a rural school participated in a story retelling treatment program. The program was designed to determine if story retelling was effective in increasing the listening comprehension scores of the participants. Eighteen students served as a control group. Materials included The California Achievement Test Level 10 Form E for the pretest and the posttest. The comprehension subtest of the CAT was administered to examine the students' abilities in listening comprehension. For a period of three weeks, students in the treatment group had twelve stories read aloud to them. Following eight of the read aloud sessions the children had the opportunity to retell the story they heard to a partner. In the other four sessions the researcher modeled the retelling task. The control group heard the same twelve stories without any postlistening activities. Results from a series of t tests indicated that giving children the opportunity to retell stories had a positive effect on their listening comprehension.