Children's story-retelling

Abstract

Children listen to stories from an early age, and are thus exposed to a rich source of well-formed and well-structured texts. This paper examines the relationship between children's progress in learning to read and their use of specialized linguistic features in retelling stories. The effectiveness of story-retelling is analysed from three per spectives: the use of story structure features, type of recall and the presence of oral and written language features. Children, aged 6 years, are found to include most story structure features in their retellings, though certain types of endings are typically omitted and differences in content are found between good and less skilled readers.