Dialogic reading gives deaf students an edge in narrative comprehension

An eight-week classroom intervention in Türkiye has found that deaf and hard-of-hearing middle school students made their strongest gains in narrative comprehension when reading instruction was built around structured dialogue, with the dialogic reading group pulling ahead of guided reading and sign language instruction groups on the most demanding story elements, particularly identifying a story’s problem, outcome, and main idea.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, compared three instructional approaches within a single framework: guided reading, dialogic reading, and direct instruction through Turkish Sign Language. Thirty deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Grades 6 and 7 at a public school serving students with hearing loss were assigned to one of the three conditions, ten students per group. All three groups worked through the same narrative texts, the same visual supports, the same story-map framework, and the same assessment schedule, so the principal difference between groups was the nature of the instructional interaction itself.

To qualify for the study, students had to meet strict eligibility criteria: no diagnosed disability other than hearing loss, severe-to-profound hearing loss, the ability to read a simple narrative text independently, and the ability to respond in Turkish Sign Language, spoken or written Turkish, or both. Thirty-eight students were initially screened using the Turkish Informal Reading Inventory, and thirty met the criteria. All participants scored within the instructional-level range of 59 to 89 on the screening assessment, and the three groups were statistically equivalent at baseline, with group means of 72.1 for guided reading, 71.3 for dialogic reading, and 72.4 for sign language instruction. Two-thirds of the students preferred sign language only as their communication method, and more than half had hearing loss in the 81 to 90 dB range.

The intervention ran for eight weeks, three sessions per week, with each session lasting approximately 80 minutes. Each week focused on one narrative text of roughly 100 words, drawn from a set of eleven stories adapted for linguistic accessibility. Every story contained the same eight target components: setting, time, characters, problem, solution, outcome, reaction, and main idea. Instruction was delivered in small groups of two students, and the same interventionist and sign-language specialist delivered the procedures across all three conditions. Comprehension was assessed at baseline, weekly during instruction, immediately after the intervention, and again at a follow-up assessment. No participants withdrew, so the final analyzed sample remained at thirty students.

The three conditions differed in how students engaged with the text. In guided reading, teachers activated prior knowledge, introduced vocabulary with visual supports, and provided prompts and comprehension checks while students took turns reading. In the sign language condition, the story was presented sentence by sentence, with each sentence read and then explained in Turkish Sign Language, followed by explicit modeling of how each narrative component could be identified and placed on the story map. Dialogic reading, by contrast, incorporated the PEER sequence of prompting, evaluating, expanding, and repeating, along with CROWD questioning that prompted completion, recall, open-ended responses, wh-questions, and distancing. Students were asked to predict events, explain causal relationships, and connect story events to their own experiences, with questions such as “Why did Fatih give his seat to the older woman?” pushing them beyond simple recall.

The quantitative results showed that all three groups improved significantly over time, but their trajectories diverged in timing and magnitude. Between-group differences were significant across all eight intervention weeks. In the first week, differences were modest but significant, with sign language instruction and dialogic reading already ahead of guided reading. By Week 4, the dialogic reading group had achieved a substantially higher mean rank than the other two groups, with the effect size reaching 0.70, and it sustained a clear advantage through the remaining weeks. Within-group analyses using the Friedman test showed significant temporal change for all three groups, with dialogic reading showing the largest average effect size at 0.59, followed by sign language instruction at 0.45 and guided reading at 0.34. Under conservative Bonferroni correction, cumulative gains became statistically robust from Week 6 onward and remained significant through posttest and follow-up, while comparisons among the final intervention week, posttest, and follow-up were not significant, indicating that gains were maintained after instruction ended.

The component-level findings were particularly revealing. On basic structural information such as setting, time, and characters, which are directly stated in the text, no consistent or significant difference emerged between the groups. The advantage of dialogic reading appeared on intermediate-level comprehension involving problem, solution, and outcome, which requires establishing cause-and-effect relationships. Beginning in Week 4, the dialogic reading group achieved significantly higher success in problem identification, and from Week 6 onward it diverged clearly from the other two groups on outcome comprehension, with an effect size of 0.64. On main idea extraction, the most advanced component, the dialogic reading group showed the strongest and most consistent performance from the first week to the last, with effect sizes ranging from 0.70 to 1.00. The authors caution that because the dialogic condition bundled several interacting features, the design cannot isolate which specific element of the package drove this pattern.

At posttest and follow-up, the differences persisted. On the follow-up total comprehension score, both the dialogic reading and sign language instruction groups significantly outperformed the guided reading group, with a large omnibus effect size of 0.75, while the dialogic and sign language groups did not differ significantly from one another. The posttest main idea component showed an effect size of 1.00, which the authors note reflects complete rank separation driven by a ceiling effect, as students in both the dialogic and sign language conditions consistently reached the maximum possible scores. The reaction component at follow-up reached an effect size of 0.88. The authors emphasize that these results demonstrate the effectiveness of both dialogic interaction and direct sign language scaffolding in consolidating learning for short-term retention, rather than showing that one approach universally replaces the others.

Six teachers who observed the sessions but did not deliver the intervention were interviewed afterward. Their accounts, analyzed thematically, broadly converged with the quantitative pattern. Teachers described increased attention, participation, and willingness to respond, particularly during dialogic reading activities, with one noting that question-and-answer activities connected to students’ own experiences were the most effective. They reported improved identification and organization of narrative elements, including problem-solution relationships, while also flagging continued difficulty with main idea identification. Teachers identified sign language support, especially for abstract vocabulary, visual materials, and story mapping as key resources for accessing and organizing narrative information. The authors stress that these qualitative findings serve as contextual rather than confirmatory evidence, since they rest on teacher perceptions rather than independent observation.

The study carries clear limitations. The sample was small, with ten students per condition, limiting statistical power and generalizability despite random assignment. The follow-up covered only short-term maintenance, so long-term durability remains unknown. The outcome measure focused on narrative comprehension through story-map components and did not assess expository text comprehension, vocabulary as an independent outcome, or transfer to independent reading. The qualitative component relied on six teachers’ perceptions. Additionally, because instruction was delivered in dyads and analyzed with separate non-parametric tests rather than multilevel models, the nesting structure was not formally modeled. The story map and visual supports were shared across all conditions, so their independent contribution cannot be disentangled. Even so, the authors conclude that accessible linguistic and visual supports may provide a common foundation for narrative comprehension, while dialogic interaction offers additional opportunities for explanation, prediction, causal reasoning, and integration of narrative information, suggesting that language accessibility and cognitively demanding interaction work best as complementary rather than competing instructional priorities.

Subject of Research: Comparing guided reading, dialogic reading, and sign language instruction for narrative comprehension in deaf and hard-of-hearing middle school students

Article Title: Comparing guided, dialogic, and sign language instruction in deaf and hard-of-hearing students' narrative comprehension

Article References: Işıkdoğan Uğurlu, N. (2026). Comparing guided, dialogic, and sign language instruction in deaf and hard-of-hearing students' narrative comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1982563. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1982563

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1982563

Keywords: deaf and hard-of-hearing students, dialogic reading, guided reading, sign language instruction, narrative comprehension, story mapping, reading intervention, Turkish Sign Language, mixed methods, special education, literacy instruction, story grammar