What Brings Diversity to Story Comprehension in Classroom?

Understanding story is interpretive activity, and there are diversities of story comprehension among students. The present study investigated how these diversities appear among students in the lesson. Thirty-two sixth-grade elementary school students have done recalling task and interpretation task after listening to a short story in moral-education class. Though all the students listened to same story, half of them recalled the endings that differ from original one. Analyses showed that which scene to be recalled as ending was related to how much student interpreted character’s feeling in the first scene. This scene included significant event, and was a peak of the story. These results suggest that the ways of interpreting the peak scene differed among students. Interpretation of the peak scene became a base for them to attach meanings to the following story, and leaded them to choose different suitable scenes for ending. The peak scene was a diverging point.