This study poses the following research question: “How does change in text
type as text contains more illustrations and fewer words influence second-graders’
comprehension of narrative text?” Eleven second-graders read three texts each and
completed a series of oral reading comprehension tasks. The three text types varied
in terms of the proportion of words to illustrations available in the text: written-only
text, combination of written and illustrated text, and illustration-only text. The
researcher interviewed each participant three times, once for each text type.
Participant scores from the retelling and comprehension questions portion of the
interview were analyzed in addition to participant’s responses to the retrospective
think aloud portion of the interview. Quantitative results from the retellings and
comprehension questions suggest an overall trend indicating that illustrations have a
positive effect on second grader’s comprehension. Qualitative data for individual
participants from their retrospective think alouds confirm this trend.