Oral comprehension and production of narratives: Two retelling task measurements

Abstract

Research on the development of oral production in childhood requires a methodological design that allows controlling tasks and variables consistently. This study aims to analize the retelling technique as well as the incidence of the oral comprehension in stories elicitation. In order to do this, we measured the comprehension level in a sample of thirty one five-year-old children through a retelling of a two episodes story (Stein & Glenn, 1979; Owens, 1991). In the application of the retelling technique we introduced two new elements to optimize the task (Reese et al., 2012). Initially, each participant individually saw an audiovisual version of the story and, secondly, then they retold this story orally with a picture book (Reese et al., 2012). Subjects then answered comprehension questions, following Pavez et al. model (2008). Transcriptions of the oral texts were assesed with oral production’s indicators, based on Petersen et al. (2008) proposal. The results allowed to describe the profile of children's comprehension of a story and their narrative oral production, pointing at the different features of narrative richness. Both measures lead to statistically different results, that support the conclusion that the ability to comprehend the story, although it seems necessary for retelling, it does not correlate with richness of the story produced by children.