Promoting narrative competence in kindergarten: An intervention study

Oral narratives are an early and pervasive aspect of children’s life in both, family and educational con-texts, and children’s narrative competence should be recognised as an aspect to be promoted throughtargeted interventions. This study analyses the efficacy of an original narrative competence interven-tion for kindergarten children, based on an embedded-explicit approach. The participants in this studywere 470 children attending the last year of kindergarten, assigned to two groups. Children’s narrativecompetence (structure, coherence and cohesion) were assessed twice, at the pre- and post-test stage.Children’s conceptual knowledge of the writing system was also assessed and included as a covariate.The experimental group received a 3-month narrative competence intervention targeting genre aware-ness, and both macro-structural and micro-structural components of narrative competence. Accordingto the results of the complex samples GLMs conducted on 376 children, the experimental group dis-played a higher improvement in narrative competence, in all three components, structure, coherence andcohesion. Overall, the study confirms the beneficial impact of a multi-componential intervention on nar-rative competence that targets both, macro- and micro-structural components, and improves children’sknowledge of the conventional rules that characterise the specific genre