The relationship between children’s narrative retelling and other aspects of language skills

Thesis

Background & Aim: Oral language skills are a critical foundation for educational success. Oral language skills are typically assessed with standardised tests involving diverse measures with highly constrained responses (e.g. CELF receptive vocabulary and sentence repetition subsets). Another measure of language skill that is typically absent from standardised tests is narrative retelling, where a child hears a story and is required to retell it. The aim of the current study is to investigate the correlation between children’s narrative retelling and other aspects of oral language skills.

Methods & Procedures: The study involves secondary data analysis based on a sample of 600 children aged between 37 and 58 months. Exploratory factor analyses were performed to examine the factor structure of measures of oral language and narrative retelling ability. Correlations and hierarchical linear regression analyses were used to assess the relationship between variables.

Results: There was a strong correlation (r =.681, p <.01) between narrative retelling and other aspects of oral language skills. Oral language skills are a strong predictor of children’s narrative retelling after controlling for demographic measures (ΔR2 = 0.344). Moreover, age, gender, and English as an additional language (EAL) made further contributions to the prediction of narrative retelling (p < 0.05).

Conclusions: Language is a unitary factor. Standardised measures of oral language skill appear to reflect a unitary trait which is strongly correlated with a measure of oral narrative retelling. It appears that oral narrative retelling is potentially a useful measure of children’s oral language skills.

Authors: Ding, Y

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mzwgzqo9d
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Exploratory factor analysis; CDE2021; Oral language skills; Hirearchical linear regression; CDE; Standardized language tests; Narrative reading; Correlation
• Subjects: Audio-lingual method (Language teaching); English language--Study and teaching (Elementary); Child development; Learning; Education