THE NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMPREHENSION SKILL AND THE ABILITY TO TELL A STORY

This experiment assessed the relation between children's comprehension skill and their knowledge about stories, as measured by their ability to tell stories from picture sequences or title prompts. To investiga te the direction of any relation between comprehension skill and story knowledge, the performance of 7- to 8-year-old less skilled comprehen ders was compared to that of two control groups: same-age skilled comp rehenders matched for reading accuracy, and younger skilled comprehend ers matched for comprehension age. The main findings were that, althou gh the groups did not differ in their use of conventional story featur es, such as beginnings, settings and endings, they did differ in the q uality of the story structure they produced, at least in the topic pro mpt condition. Also, as predicted, stories elicited with picture promp ts were better structured overall. In the easier, picture prompt, cond ition the less skilled group also performed more poorly than the skill ed group, but not significantly more poorly than the comprehension-age match group. These results demonstrate that the differences in the st ory knowledge, found between the same-age skilled and less skilled com prehenders, are nor simply the result of differential experience in re ading comprehension. Instead, they suggest that knowledge about story structure may play a causal role in the less skilled comprehenders' co mprehension difficulties. Possible sources of these differences are di scussed.