Retelling Stories Boosts Kids' Understanding

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When children learn to read, it's so exciting for the family's grownups—not to mention the kids! More and more parents are discovering how important their role is in helping their children to learn. Many schools, in fact, now require (or at least strongly urge) parents to take an active part, reading to and with their children on a daily basis, for example.

Parents need not be reading specialists, far from it. Showing a sincere and sustained interest in reading, and encouraging the child, counts for a whole lot. That said, parents and other adults might find a couple of tips useful in helping kids with reading. Parents can try story retelling as a strategy to boost kids' understanding. Story retelling helps kids see the different parts of a story, the various details, and how the parts all fit together. It's a strategy used by volunteer reading tutors, suggested in The Tutor, a newsletter from LEARNS at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. LEARNS is a partnership with the Laboratory, the Bank Street College of Education, and Corporation for National Service. Current and past issues of The Tutor are free for downloading from the Web (www.nwrel.org/learns/tutor/index.html).

It works this way: The adult reads the story; then asks the child to tell the story in his or her own words. Before starting, the adult says something like: First, I'll read the story to you, and then you tell the story to me, just like to a friend who doesn't know the story. Because the child pulls together the various parts of the story, rebuilding and integrating the parts, story retelling tells more than the story at hand. It signals degrees of comprehension.

"Retelling does not mean memorizing—it means recounting the same story in the child's own words," say writers Akimi Gibson, Judith Gold, and Charissa Sgouros in the newsletter. "Retelling requires children to think more conceptually—to look at the bigger picture—rather than answering specific questions about the text. …The more experience children have with retelling, the more they are able to understand, synthesize, and infer."

The process reveals "not only what readers or listeners remember, but also what they understand," say the authors. "Retellings build story comprehension." The writers first point to 1976 research suggesting "that the comprehension of six-to-eight-year-olds significantly improved when they were asked to retell a story after it was read to them." Later studies bolstered that indication. "Each study found a significant improvement in oral language complexity, story comprehension, and understanding of story structure," they say.

When kids hesitate or get stuck, gentle prompts such as What happened next? are in order. With practice, kids get better at retelling; it helps if you use familiar stories. And if you find it exciting when kids learn to read, think how exciting it is to see their understanding grow!

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.