Oral Narrative Production Research Articles

Oral narrative intervention for children with mixed reading disability

Ten children (aged between 7;11 and 9;2) with mixed reading disability participated in an oral narrative intervention programme that focused on enhancing children's story structure knowledge. The participants had all demonstrated persistent reading and oral narrative comprehension and production difficulties in a two-year longitudinal study prior to the intervention. A non-equivalent pretest—posttest control group design was used in which one group of five children was randomly selected to receive the intervention immediately and the other group of five children received the intervention delayed. A speech language therapist implemented the intervention in small group sessions twice weekly until 12 hours of intervention were completed. The results indicated significant treatment effects for oral narrative comprehension performance. Despite this improvement in children's ability to answer comprehension questions relating to story structure elements, there was little change in oral narrative production performance as a result of the intervention, and transfer to reading comprehension was not evident.

School-Age Children's Self-Assessment of Oral Narrative Production

This study examined aspects of self-assessment, a metacognitive ability, and oral narrative production in 401 children between 5 and 12 years of age. Oral narrative production was evaluated through the administration of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL). Self-assessment of narrative performance was determined by asking children to self-evaluate their ability to “tell a good story” by pointing to one of five pictures from a “very happy face” (rating of 5) to a “very sad face” (rating of 1). Analysis of the data demonstrated that (a) older children (≥ 10 years of age) were more accurate than younger children in their ability to self-evaluate narrative performance; (b) there was a significant difference in narrative production skills between children who rated themselves as poor performers (self-rating of 1 or 2) and children who were high self-raters (≥ 3); (c) narrative self-evaluation varied in relation to gender, with males tending to more frequently overestimate their narrative ability; and (d) children with poor narrative ability were more likely to overestimate the quality of their narrative production than good narrators were. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.