Abstract
Abstract With the majority of students with learning disabilities (LD) having difficulties in reading, teachers at all grade levels need to incorporate comprehension strategies into their instruction to explicitly teach students with LD how to use the strategies to enhance their comprehension. One way for teachers to support students' comprehension of narrative text is to actively instruct them in using story grammar strategies. Story grammar provides students with a framework to help them understand narrative texts and includes common elements such as plot, character, setting, and theme. This review provides an overview of research focused on using story grammar as a comprehension strategy, as well as examines the success of the strategy with students with special needs and reading difficulties. ********** As students progress through school, their reading comprehension, or the gathering of meaning from printed word (Sencibaugh, 2007), becomes more crucial because teachers present new material through text (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1997). Explicit instruction in this area can help students with learning disabilities (LD) make gains in their comprehension (NRP, 2000; RAND, 2002; Williams, 2002). For students with LD, as well as students who struggle with reading (Morgan & Fuchs, 2007), helpful instructional strategies include such methods as prior knowledge activation, vocabulary instruction, strategies instruction, peer programs, repeated readings, and story grammar/structure instruction (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). One comprehension strategy, story grammar, maintains that every narrative story has a beginning, a conflict that emerges with rising action, a high point or climax of the conflict, and an ending or resolution of the conflict (Dickson, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998b). Other elements of story grammar include information about the main and supporting characters and the theme of the story (Dimino, Gersten, Carnine, & Blake, 1990). Story grammar has often also been referred to as story schema (Mandler & DeForest, 1979) which is actually the representation of story structure that readers carry in their minds (Amer, 1992) or story structure which is how it is used in the structure of stories (Singer & Donlan, 1982). Story mapping (Duke & Pearson, 2002) is the visual representation of story grammar that can be as simple as an outline or as detailed as a complex picture or visual organizer. Studies have found that typical students normally cease to need instruction in the elements of story grammar around the fourth grade level (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979). Research describing, comparing, and correlating story grammar abilities across age and ability levels shows that students with LD do not have as well developed sense of story grammar as their non-disabled peers, which may explain why their reading comprehension is poorer (Griffith, Dastoli, Ripich, & Nwakanma, 1985; Griffith, Ripich, & Dastoli, 1986; Montague, Maddux, & Dereshiwsky, 1990; Ouellette, Dagostino, & Carifio, 1998; Wilkinson, Elkins, & Bain, 1995). Students with LD recall fewer elements of a story and seem to have trouble identifying the more abstract elements of a story, such as theme and resolution. However, these same studies suggest that interventions involving expansion of students' with disabilities knowledge of story structure, might improve their reading comprehension (Arthaud & Goracke, 2006; Dimino, Taylor, & Gersten, 1995; Duke & Pearson, 2002; NRP, 2000; RAND, 2002). Since the research points to instruction in story grammar as beneficial to improving reading comprehension in students both with and without LD, it is important that educators actively teach story grammar and other comprehension skills in their classrooms. For example, it is known that teaching both comprehension strategy instruction (Franzak, 2006; NRP, 2000; RAND, 2002) and metacognitive awareness of comprehension monitoring (Dickson, Collins, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998; Gersten, et al. …
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