How Slovak 3rd graders report about aurally presented text
Submitted by:
Ludmila Liptakova
Abstract:
The paper presents theoretical background and empirical research on listening comprehension of narrative and expository text in Slovak 3rd graders. In Slovak context, both the research and educational practice regarding listening comprehension is insufficient. Furthermore, from the literature we know, how important is the ability to understand the oral language for the reading comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Oakhill & Cain, 2012; etc.). For this reason, in our research we focused on children´s inference making both during and after listening to the text. Before we exposed the children to make inferences that deepen the understanding, we verified if a coherent understanding of the text was achieved. To find out how the listener reconstructed a cohesive representation of the text, the retelling method was used (see Dougherty Stahl & García, 2017: 250).
In the paper we present the data obtained from 64 third graders (8- to 9-year-old children) via retelling method. Children were exposed to the aurally presented monomodal narrative text (32 participants) and multimodal expository text, combining language and sound (32 participants). The narrative text was 294 tokens in length, the multimodal text was 247 tokens in length plus 25 sounds. The retelling task was assessed based on inclusion of the important ideas, as defined within a particular text genre and its modality (see Dougherty Stahl & García, 2017: 250).
Preliminary data show that different retelling parameters were due to different text genre and modality. Retelling length of narrative text was longer than retelling length of multimodal text. The difference in the extent of retellings reflects the fact that children are not familiar with the multimodal text of that structure as well as a conceptual difficulty of a multimodal expository text. This is also reflected in the number of inferences, which was higher in narrative text. Nevertheless, inaccurate inferences were identified more frequently in retellings of narrative text (comp. Kraal et al., 2017).
Our findings point out that text genre and its modality may affect the way the listener processes the text. This also implies the importance of exposing the children to different genres of aurally presented text.
Key words: listening comprehension, retelling, narrative text, expository text, multimodal text, third graders, Slovak
References
Dougherty Stahl, K. A., & García, G. E. (2017). Using Assessments to Map and Evaluate the Comprehension Development of Young Children. In S. E. Israel (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension (pp. 241-270). The Guilford Press.
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6-10.
Kraal, A., Koornneef, A. W., Saab, N., & Van den Broek, P. W. (2017). Processing of expository and narrative texts by low- and high-comprehending children. Reading and Writing, 31, 2017-2040.
Oakhill, J., & Cain, K. (2012). The precursors of reading ability in young readers: Evidence from a four-year longitudinal study. In Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(16), 91-121.