The Role of Narrative Ability on Emergent Literacy Skills and Early Word Reading of Early Childhood Students

Abstract

Narrative ability is one of the abilities included in emergent literacy and plays a very important role in the development of students' early reading skills. However, research examining the relationship between narrative skills, emergent literacy skills and word reading skills is still limited. Through this research, the researcher investigates the role of narrative ability on emergent literacy ability and reading ability. Besides that, the study investigates the predictive relationship between students' narrative ability, emergent literacy ability, and early word reading ability. The method used in this study was factorial design analysis with several types of data analysis, namely descriptive, correlation, and regression to see the role and relationship of narrative ability, emergent literacy ability, and students' initial word reading ability. Participants in this study were early childhood students, totaling 250 students with an age range of 2-5 years. The research findings show that narrative ability has a significant positive correlation with all aspects of emergent literacy measures. Narrative ability is able to predict the ability to read words in the univariate model. Storybook retelling instructions result in a story that is longer than the original story. This change in story length can have an impact on the use of complex language and decontextualization such as vocabulary development, development of linguistics units, understanding of characters in stories, and story organization. Furthermore, this study also shows that the relationship between students' narrative ability and word reading ability can be mediated by emergent literacy skills, including syntactic abilities, knowledge of letters, phonological abilities, pronunciation of letter sounds, and print conventions. Although the relationship between narrative ability and students' initial reading ability is not direct, this narrative ability makes a significant contribution because narrative ability has a significant impact on emergency literacy skills which, in turn, supports the development of students' reading skills. This research implies that parents or teachers need to consider various alternatives in developing students' reading skills by optimizing narrative skills and other emergency literacy skills so that students are better prepared when they enter school age.