Instructing narrative text: Using children's concept of story with reciprocal teaching activities to foster story understanding and metacognition

This study investigated the effectiveness of story structure and reciprocal strategy instruction as a means to promote fifth-grade students' thematic comprehension of narrative story text and metacognition about story reading. Participants were twenty-four children in one naturally-occurring fifth-grade classroom, who were evenly divided into two groups: (a) the story structure and reciprocal teaching experimental group, who received instruction in the structural elements of story text and the reciprocal teaching procedure involving the use of four comprehension strategies in a conversational format for comprehending the stories read, and (b) the story mapping alternate treatment-comparison group, who received instruction in constructing story maps for engaging in independent mapping of the same stories. Quantitative analyses were performed on three dependent measures: a story retelling test, a comprehension questions test, and a metacognitive knowledge about story reading questionnaire test. Results indicated (a) no significant performance differences between the groups on the comprehension measures, (b) superior performance for the experimental group on the metacognitive knowledge questionnaire measure, and (c) a positive relationship between metacognitive knowledge and comprehension performance as measured by the comprehension questions test. It was concluded that story structure and reciprocal strategy instruction is likely to foster comprehension of thematic meaning when there is shared emphasis on students' experiential meaning and the aesthetic aspects of literary reading and that metacognition about story reading can be increased through instruction directed toward imparting that knowledge.