Kindergarteners’ narrative competence across tasks and time

This longitudinal study investigated children’s narrative competence by analysing the development of the reciprocal relationship between storytelling and story retelling performances over a school year through a cross-lagged panel design. The participants in this study were 170 Italian kindergarten pupils (mean age: 4.98 ± .31 years). Children were asked to produce oral narratives in two different tasks: a storytelling and a story retelling task. Narrative competence was assessed in terms of structure and coherence. The cross-lagged panel analyses showed that both storytelling and story retelling tasks are stable constructs, but they differ in the emphasis on coherence. Data confirmed the pivotal role played by storytelling as a task, and structure as a component in fostering the development of children’s narrative competence. Overall, results from this study suggest that storytelling and story retelling are tasks that involve inter-related but not overlapping processes, and trigger different aspects of narrative competence.