Proceedings of The 2nd World Conference on Education and Teaching
Year: 2021
DOI:
Didactic practices for helping kindergarteners improve their listening comprehension skills. Family-school cooperation
Elissavet Chlapana
ABSTRACT:
Helping young children improve their listening comprehension throughout the preschool years is significant for their literacy and academic achievement in the subsequent school years. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of a story reading program on kindergarteners’ listening comprehension skills improvement. The sample consisted of 14 children aged 4 to 6 years enrolled in a classroom of a public kindergarten school located in a rural area of Crete. The children participated in appropriate practices to develop skills which are significant for listening comprehension. For that purpose, the classroom teacher was trained to: (a) implement dialogic reading with an emphasis in applying direct instruction techniques which foster vocabulary learning and text comprehension and (b) conduct post reading activities which aimed at helping young children improve their questioning skills and retelling abilities as well as their knowledge of the story structure elements. Children’s parents were also trained to read the selected stories by using appropriate materials to guide children in the text comprehension process. Story reading sessions were recorded, transcribed and analyzed through content analysis to describe any possible development in their comprehenasion skills. The results provide indications about children’s response to the implemented program regarding as well as the difficulties they faced in deriving text meaning and improving the targeted comprehension skills.
keywords: dialogic reading; direct instruction, kindergarteners; listening comprehension.