A study on the performance of reading-disabled children in narrative structure in Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the performance of a certain group of Mandarin-speaking reading-disabled (RD) children in narrative structure. Twentyone first/second graders, aged from 6;10 to 7;11, took part. All subjects have been assessed by WISC-III, and evaluated as of normal intelligence. Eight of them have a specific literacy difficulty. Moreover, all of them have also passed Lin's (1997) Standardized Language Impairment Assessment. Under these basic controls, two narrative assignments, a series of Look-and-Say narratives and a re-telling pictorial story, were administered. To assess how the subjects package each story, we adopted the principle of Labov's analysing points to examine their narrative structure. Generally speaking, the narrative data of RD children and the normals both seem to have a ‘story-like’ structure. However, the result of high-point analysis in statistics shows that RD children's performance on orientation, complicating actions, resolution, and ever evaluation is less than the norm. This finding also provided reasonable evidence to explain the general concept of why RD children's narratives seem simple, disordered, immature and less organized. It is hoped that the findings here could provide a small contribution to re-examining the efficiency of the present standardized language assessments in Taiwan, and further, to developing more valid implements for assessing specific children's oral production.