Dramatized Reading in the Classroom: Effect on Learner Readers’ Inferential Comprehension
Résumé
Understanding an oral narrative is a predictive skill for future reading comprehension. There are a variety of levers for promoting this comprehension in listening situations, and teacher narration seems to be one of those to be encouraged at school. This study aims to explore the extent to which expressive narration without gestures and dramatized narration have an effect on inferential comprehension of narratives. Pre-reader children (N = 165, aged 5–7, 55% girls) from the South of France answered inferential comprehension questions during story listening. Based on a within-subjects experimental design, narratives were presented in three modalities: with inexpressive narration, with expressive narration, and with dramatized narration, each child having seen all modalities. The results showed better inferential comprehension scores when the stories were presented with theatrical narration, particularly with regard to scores in the production of emotional inferences enabling an emotional mental state to be attributed to the protagonists.