A scalable tool for assessing children's language abilities within a narrative context: The NAP (Narrative Assessment Protocol)

The Home Literacy Environment and the English Narrative Development of Spanish–English Bilingual Children

“…As children practice telling stories, they develop their use of decontextualized language (i.e., talk about abstract ideas or events and objects not immediately present), which is both characteristic of written text and valued in the classroom (Curenton, Craig, & Flanigan, 2008;Dickinson & Snow, 1987). As a consequence, it is commonly agreed that oral narrative production plays an important role in fostering young children's literacy skills, such as reading comprehension, narrative writing, and reading fluency, as well as their overall academic outcomes (e.g., Bishop & Edmundson, 1987;Feagans & Appelbaum, 1986;Griffin et al, 2004;Justice, Bowles, Pence, & Gosse, 2010;Pankratz, Plante, Vance, & Insalaco, 2007;E. Reese, Suggate, Long, & Schaughency, 2010;Speece, Roth, Cooper, & De La Paz, 1999;Tabors, Snow, & Dickinson, 2001).…”

Dialect-Neutral Indices of Narrative Cohesion and Evaluation

“…Especially since the landmark work of Berman and Slobin (1994), several schemas have been proposed for standardizing narrative assessment, most notably, The Test of Narrative Language (Gilliam & Pearson, 2004 AQ17 ), the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (Schneider, Dube, & Hayward, 2005), the Index of Narrative Micro-Structure (INMIS; Justice et al, 2006), and very recently, the Narrative Assessment Protocol (NAP; Justice et al, 2010). All of these measures provide valuable information about children's narratives, but except for the NAP, they all require the time and ability to record and listen to or transcribe the multiple stories involved.…”

“…The effect of PED level on these measures was relatively weak, with no significant effect on the subindices AQ31 of cohesion and evaluation or on the composite index. For the ToM measure, even this truncated range of PED level was a significant factor but accounted for very little of the variance.Finally, the stories elicited by the protocol used in this study fulfill the goal set out by Justice et al (2010) to be "scalable" for use with large numbers of children. The singlepage picture sequences in this study were easy to administer and code.…”

“…The protocol P. de Villiers devised with his colleagues included stimuli that improved the elicitation of these elements and permitted them to be noted down while the story was being told. It could be used by people with minimal knowledge about narrative structures, an important feature also pointed out by Justice et al (2010). P. de Villiers (2004 argued that an assessment based on these four indices together exhibits the three crucial qualities of a satisfactory measure: development, discrimination, and dialect neutrality.…”

“…Variation between AAE and GAE dialect was not a significant factor. Conclusion: By focusing on dialect-neutral elements of narratives-creating links across sentences and providing mental state interpretations-this study adds to our knowledge of development and impairment in narrative production among both AAE-and GAE-background children.Key Words: dialect, narrative, AAE, assessment, cohesion T he narrative abilities of children in prekindergarten and elementary school have been recognized as important indicators of their language level generally and as a key to their school readiness (Justice, Bowles, Pence, & Gosse, 2010;Pankratz, Plante, Vance, & Insalaco, 2007;Snow, Tabors, Nicholson, & Kurland, 1995). Telling stories is a developmentally appropriate and naturalistic activity (Schraeder, Quinn, Stockman, & Miller, 1999) that is found in all cultures (Campbell, 1949).…”