An article in Reading Today (2004) includes a book review of Tell Me a Story. The article explains that comprehension is one of the critical elements of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (NRP) and is widely considered the true goal of reading. Retelling incorporates several of the research-based strategies recommended in the NRP report, such as using graphic organizers, identifying story structure, and summarizing text. If students' retellings are to be assessed effectively, teachers need to instruct retelling in such a way that the students can retell what they have read in a logical, sequential manner. The article states that Hansen's book shows teachers how retelling a story can help children improve students' comprehension skills ("Retelling strategies to boost comprehension offered in new IRA book," 2004, 14).
Kerry Stanley writing in ASHA Leader (2003) suggests that story-retelling tasks have the potential to be used as a brief screener of children's' global syntactic features. Story-retelling is already used to assess narrative skills, but in a recent edition of the Journal of Speech-Language Pathology it was suggested that there is a possibility that a standardized story retelling task could be used to determine if a child needs further testing for learning disabilities. Stanley was careful to point out that this idea has not been validated by clinical tests, nor is it precise enough to determine the severity of language delay or the reason for that delay, however as a screening tool for learning skills and learning disabilities this tool holds promise (Stanley, 2003, 9).
Karen Woods and Jeannine Jones writing in Preventing School Failure (1998) note that providing a means of including struggling learners in classroom activities is a problem facing teachers at all grade levels. One approach that has promise is the use of flexible grouping strategies inherent in collaborative learning, which, according t...