A treatment programme for improving story-telling ability: a case study

Abstract

The purpose of the present investigation was to measure the effects of a treatment programme on the story-telling ability of a second-grade language/learning-disabled male. Treatment was conducted twice a week for a period of 12 weeks. Results revealed an improvement in both the length and complexity of the subject's oral stories. These results are discussed relative to the role of language treatment on academic success.

Language Use in Social Interactions of School-Age Children With Language Impairments: An Evidence-Based Systematic Review of Treatment

“…The designs of each study were classified as follows: Two studies (Adams, 2001;Klecan-Aker, 1993) were identified as "case studies"; that is, a study with uncontrolled observation (descriptive) report of events and outcomes in one or more participants. Two studies (Adams, Lloyd, Aldred, & Baxendale, 2006;Swanson et al, 2005) used "case series" designs whereby pretest-posttest data were collected across a sequence of individual participants.…”

“…The quality indicator scores for the studies ranged from 0 to 4 out of a possible 6 points for study protocol description, blinding, sampling/allocation, treatment fidelity, significance, and practical significance. Five of the eight studies provided sufficient description of the study protocol so that the treatment could be replicated (Adams et al, 2006;Dollaghan & Kaston, 1986;Klecan-Aker, 1993;Richardson & Klecan-Aker, 2000;Swanson et al, 2005); however, only two studies (Adams, 2001;Swanson et al, 2005) explicitly stated that the assessors were blind to the study conditions. None of the studies used random assignment.…”

“…Generally, the number of participants enrolled in studies of this kind has increased. The three earliest studies included one to four participants (Bedrosian & Willis, 1987;Dollaghan & Kaston, 1986;Klecan-Aker, 1993); the latter five studies included the following number of participants: two (Adams, 2001), five (Adams et al, 2006), nine (Merrison & Merrison, 2005), 10 (Swanson et al, 2005, and 20 (Richardson & Klecan-Aker, 2000). Participants ranged in age from 5;0 (years;months) to 11;0.…”

“…Treatment goals were identified using a range of assessment procedures, including conversational language samples (Adams, 2001;Adams et al, 2006;Bedrosian & Willis, 1987;Richardson & Klecan-Aker, 2000;Swanson et al, 2005), narrative samples (Adams, 2001;Klecan-Aker, 1993;Swanson et al, 2005), and investigator-designed criterionreferenced assessments (Dollaghan & Kaston, 1986;Merrison & Merrison, 2005). Two of the studies used changes in standard scores to document some of the effects of the treatment (Adams, 2001;Adams et al, 2006); however, none of the studies used norm-referenced assessments to identify treatment goals.…”

“…Production goals focused on increasing participants' topic initiation (Bedrosian & Willis, 1987) and topic maintenance skills (Adams, 2001;Adams et al, 2006;Richardson & Klecan-Aker, 2000) and decreasing irrelevant comments and questions (Adams, 2001;Adams et al, 2006). In studies that used narratives as the context for treatments (Klecan-Aker, 1993;Swanson et al, 2005), the goals included increases in the number of story grammar components such as settings, plans, and resolutions and improvement in the overall cohesion of the narrative (i.e., linguistic devices used to connect the elements of the text such as articles and conjunctions). Some of the studies targeted broader social communication goals such as appropriate use of prosody (Adams, 2001), identification of emotions (Richardson & Klecan-Aker, 2000), and improvement of social understanding and metapragmatics (e.g., "helping the child to become consciously aware of communication rules and knowledge," Adams, 2001, p. 295), but procedures for obtaining these broader goals were not as explicitly detailed as the procedures for obtaining the more traditional topic management goals.…”