Use of Narrative-Based Language Intervention With Children Who Have Specific Language Impairment

lswanson{at}utk.edu

Ten 7–8-year-old children with specific language impairment participated in a 6-week program of narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) in an effort to evaluate NBLI's feasibility. Each intervention session targeted story content as well as story and sentence form using story retell and generation tasks. Eight children achieved the clinically significant improvement criterion from pre- and posttest comparisons of at least 1.45 points on a narrative quality (NQ) rating (p < .013). Throughout the NBLI program, the children were informally observed to show increased self-confidence in their narrative production skills. Nearly all children preferred story generation activities over story retell tasks, while story retell tasks were favored over sentence imitation drills. Pre- and posttest comparisons for number of different words, developmental sentence score, and a sentence imitation task were nonsignificant. This indicated no further evidence of positive outcomes for NBLI. Based on the significant findings for NQ, NBLI is worthy of further investigation. Modifications to enhance its ability to produce positive gains are discussed.

Key Words: narrative, intervention, story composition, specific language impairment, children

Submitted on December 18, 2003
Accepted on February 25, 2005

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