Keeping Grounded: A Longitudinal Study Exploring Immersive Strategies to Improve Children's Comprehension of Narrative Texts
In support of the grounded nature of discourse-level comprehension, encouraging children to immerse themselves in a story’s content has been found to improve their performance on reading comprehension measures. The current study explored the long-term benefits of two immersive strategies, storyboard construction (SC) and active experiencing (AE), on children’s (9-10 year olds) overall comprehension of narrative texts. At the beginning of the year, one third of participants learned how to use SC (the active recreation of a story using plastic cut-outs), one third learned how to use AE (to act out a story using emotional expression and movement) and one third participated in a session with no specific training. After training, participants read two short stories, using their respective strategy, and then answered a combination of emotion-based and spatial-based comprehension questions. We found that children who used AE performed better on emotion-based questions and children who used SC performed better on spatial-based questions. The benefits did not persist when children used imagery-based versions of the strategies with novel stories. The differential benefits of the two strategies support the grounded, multi-dimensional nature of children’s mental representations of narrative texts.
Date: 8 March 2016, 15:00 (Tuesday, 8th week, Hilary 2016)
Venue: Tinbergen Building, South Parks Road OX1 3PS
Venue Details: C113 Weiskrantz Room
Speaker: Molly Berenhaus (University of Sussex)
Organising department: Department of Experimental Psychology
Host: Marina Puglisi (University of Oxford)
Part of: Department of Experimental Psychology - Language & Development Seminars
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Janice Young