Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such
routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge,
however, has not been clearly established. The present research tested whether an 8-week
shared-reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal
education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning
techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize
elements of story knowledge. Forty English-speaking five- and six-year-olds were assigned to
either the dialogic-reading or an alternative-treatment group. ANCOVA results found that the
dialogic-reading children’s post-test narratives were significantly better on structure and context
measures than those for the alternative-treatment children, but results differed for produced or
retold narratives. The dialogic-reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains.
Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction
knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.