The relations of proper character introduction
to narrative quality and listening comprehension
for young children from high poverty schools
Adrienne E. Barnes
•
Young-Suk Kim
•
Beth M. Phillips
Published online: 30 August 2013
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract The present study explored the types and frequency of literate language
features in children’s narratives, and the relation of literate language and proper
character introduction to children’s oral language skills in a sample of 184 pre-
kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade students from high-poverty schools.
Using hierarchical regression, the results showed that literate language features were
not predictive of listening comprehension or narrative quality outcomes. In contrast,
children’s skill in properly introducing characters significantly accounted for vari-
ance in all outcome measures (narrative comprehension, narrative quality, and lis-
tening comprehension) above and beyond the control variables (age, total number of
words, and mean length of utterance) and literate language features (adverbs,
conjunctions, mental and linguistic verbs, and elaborated noun phrases). These
results indicate that the child’s retell and language comprehension skills may
develop concurrently with proper character introduction.
Keywords Decontextualized discourse Á Listening comprehension Á Literate
language features Á Narratives Á Oral retell Á Character introduction
Introduction
Narratives are a unique form of discourse, comprised of characteristics that
transcend culture to communicate the human experience in a way that fulfills a
A. E. Barnes (&)
College of Education, Florida State University, 1114 W Call Street,
Suite 2204 H, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4301, USA
e-mail: abarnes@fcrr.org
Y.-S. Kim Á B. M. Phillips
College of Education, Florida State University and Florida Center for Reading Research,
Tallahassee, FL, USA
123
Read Writ (2014) 27:1189–1205
DOI 10.1007/s11145-013-9481-0
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