In need of critical comments

[sykotropic]

Prompted Retelling

At the conclusion of the fairy tale, children will be asked to immediately respond to scripted questions that allow the child to retell the story in their own words.   The purpose of re-telling a story is to assess the child’s understanding.   A scripted retelling is being used based on pilot testing results that indicate

Comments

Comments part 5: the rest

[cos]

"The dependent variables are the retelling accuracy score, the picture sort accuracy score and a composite listening comprehension score"

Is the composite something derived from the retelling and picture sort scores, or independent of them, or a composite of them and something else? Ahh, you answer that at the end of the next paragraph. Maybe that's intentional. I'd find it clearer to have it specified when it is introduced: "and a composite listening comprehension score which is a sum of the former two" or "which is derived from", something like that.

"... the hypothesis that dialogic reading enhances listening comprehension. The results of this study are important because shared storybook reading is a low cost method for increasing emergent literacy skills,"

Doesn't that depend not only on finding out whether dialogic reading enhances comprehension of the story they get with dialogic reading, but also that it enhances their comprehension of some subsequent story they hear without prompts? That is, I think you're saying that you'll find support for the hypothesis that they'll better understand a story if they hear it with prompts, and also saying that this will increase their literacy skills, but the experiment described here can only establish the former, not the latter.

"Three, a longitudinal study should be designed to evaluate the effects of the training on later reading comprehension." --- ahh, indeed. Here's the part where you may figure out the latter. But I think the earlier paragraph implies that this experiment could imply something that you couldn't get from it (but could get from the longitudinal study).

"children who are not grade on level" - is this a commonly used phrase I'm not familiar with, or should it be "children who are not at grade level" or something like that?