Oral narrative competence and literacy skills

Several studies have demonstrated the role of narrative competence in predicting later academic achievement, but only a few authors tried to highlight exact relationships between the different aspects of these two complex domains. The main aim of the present work was to investigate this association considering the micro- and macrostructural levels of narratives and both the automatism of reading and writing and more complex literacy skills. Participants were 45 Italian children attending the second and third year of primary school. A battery of tasks assessing their narrative, linguistic, and learning abilities was administered. The results partially confirmed the hypothesized associations between narrative macrostructure, in particular information density and the use of psychological lexicon, and ‘higher’ abilities, in particular written text production.