Effects a peer-tutorial story-map intervention on the reading and writing of students with and without German as a second language

Reading and writing are enormously valuable, influencing every area of life beyond school. However, reading and writing difficulties are on the rise, especially among second-language students. The primary objective of this study is to design a classroom intervention that simultaneously promotes reading and writing and is easy to implement. In a pilot study, we implemented a story-map reading intervention using the SRSD model to promote reading comprehension and text production in third- and fourth-grade elementary students with reading difficulties (N = 60), several of them with German as a second language (n = 15). We implemented an experimental design with an intervention group and a control group with pretest, posttest, and follow-up measurements. The results of the ANCOVA demonstrate that the intervention effectively promotes sentence and text comprehension in a very short time with significant key effects among the group (sentence comprehension, η² = 0.17; text comprehension, η² = 0.36) and stable follow-up data. We observed only a descriptive improvement in text writing quality; the results of the ANCOVA are not meaningful due to violations. Moreover, within the framework of social validity, the data displayed predominantly positive feedback on the intervention. This study provides a promising direction for using a story map as an instructional tool to enhance students’ reading comprehension and possibly text writing quality.