Enhancing Young Children Narrative Skills: The Effects of a Self-regulated Instructional Strategy

Hellen Vretudaki^1,

¹University of Crete, Greece

Cite this paper:
Hellen Vretudaki. Enhancing Young Children Narrative Skills: The Effects of a Self-regulated Instructional Strategy. American Journal of Educational Research. 2021; 9(3):91-96. doi: 10.12691/education-9-3-1

Abstract

In spite of the constantly increasing children’s needs mainly concerning their social-emotional competencies, the necessity to reinforce their oral skills is considered of high importance. Also, despite the openly acknowledged agony of researchers to find modern, effective instructional methods, in practice very few studies suggest means, procedures and techniques that can productively “meet” the differentiated levels of preschool children’s oral and written language comprehension and production. Given that narrative takes a dominant place in children’s oral skills, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a self-regulated instructional strategy on kindergarten children's narrative skills development. The sample consisted of 98 children aged 5-6 attending 10 kindergarten in a local school. In the experimental group a training program was implemented over eight weeks. The results showed that training in narrating fictional stories helped children assimilate story structure and enabled them to apply it effectively when they were asked to create a fictional story. In addition, children in the experimental group had significant higher performance than those in the control group. The significant effect of the training program in young children’s narrative skills remained even after they entered primary school.

Keywords:
narrative skills fictional stories Kindergarten Self-Regulated instructional strategy training program

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