The Role of Narrative Ability in Emergent Literacy and Early Word Reading of Early Childhood Students

Narrative ability is a crucial component of emergent literacy and foundational for developing early reading skills. Despite its importance, limited research has explored the relationship between narrative skills, emergent literacy, and early word reading. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the role and predictive power of narrative ability on emergent literacy and word reading in early childhood students.

The study employed a factorial design analysis, utilizing descriptive, correlation, and regression analyses to examine the interactions between narrative ability, emergent literacy, and early word reading. Participants included 250 early childhood students aged 2-5 years, providing a robust sample for analyzing these developmental connections.

The research revealed a significant positive correlation between narrative ability and all measured aspects of emergent literacy. Additionally, narrative ability was found to predict word reading ability in a univariate model. Notably, storybook retelling instructions led to longer stories, indicating increased language complexity and decontextualization, which contributes to vocabulary development, linguistic unit understanding, character comprehension, and story organization.

A key finding is that the relationship between narrative ability and word reading ability is mediated by emergent literacy skills. These mediating skills include syntactic abilities, letter knowledge, phonological abilities, pronunciation of letter sounds, and print conventions. Although narrative ability does not directly impact early reading, its significant influence on emergent literacy skills in turn supports the development of reading skills.

This study underscores the importance for parents and teachers to optimize narrative skills and other emergent literacy skills when developing students' reading abilities. By focusing on these foundational areas, children can be better prepared for school, highlighting the need for varied approaches to support reading development in early childhood.