The Effects of Group Size on Interactive Storybook Reading

THE AUTHORS investigated children's comprehension of stories and their verbal interactions during storybook readings in groups of varying sizes. Adults read storybooks to 27 kindergarten and first-grade children from five U.S. school districts. Each child heard three stories read in each of three settings: one-to-one, small-group (3 children per group), and wholeclass (15 children or more). Measures were taken on only the third reading in each setting. On probed and free recall comprehension tests, children who heard stories in the small-group setting performed significantly better than children who heard stories read one-to-one, who in turn performed significantly better than children who heard stories read to the whole class. In addition, as expected, children who heard stories read in a small group or one-to-one generated significantly more comments and questions than children in the whole-class setting. Thus, reading to children in small groups appears to offer as much interaction as one-toone readings, and (surprisingly) appears to lead to greater comprehension than whole-class or even one-to-one readings.