Large group narrative intervention in Head Start preschools: Implications for response to intervention

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of a large group narrative intervention on diverse preschoolers’ narrative language skills with aims to explore questions of treatment efficacy and differential response to intervention. A quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest comparison group research design was employed with 71 preschool children. Classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment and comparison conditions. Intervention consisted of explicit teaching of narrative structure via repeated story retell practice, illustrations and icons, and peer mediation. Children’s narrative language and comprehension were assessed at Pretest, Posttest, and 4 weeks after treatment. Statistically significant differences between treatment and comparison groups were found on retell and story comprehension measures. A priori classification criteria resulted in 28 percent of the participants identified as Minimal Responders on the story retell measure and 19 percent as Minimal Responders on the story comprehension measure. Children who were dual-language learners did not have a different pattern of response than monolingual English speakers. Low-intensity narrative intervention delivered to a large group of children was efficacious and can serve as a targeted language intervention for use within preschool classrooms. A culturally and linguistically appropriate, dynamic approach to assessment identified children for whom intensified intervention would be recommended.

Effects of an Individualized Narrative Intervention on Children’s Storytelling and Comprehension Skills

“…Like in the present study, Spencer and Slocum's participants improved their personal stories but not as much as their retells. The large group intervention (T. D. Spencer et al, 2014) did not produce a significant gain in children's personal stories, but improvements on retells and comprehension questions were similar to those found in the present study. It is not surprising that the results across all three Story Champs preschool studies are similar because the expectation of multitiered intervention systems is to provide differentiated levels of intervention intensity so that all children can learn the necessary skills.…”

Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?

“…The most likely explanation for these differences in correlations at time 1 and time 2 is the growth in verbal productivity as shown by much longer oral narratives at the end of the school year (mean 14.2 utterances; Table 1) compared to school-entry (mean 8.1 utterances; Table 1), most likely due to exposure to stories as part of the tier 1 intervention [54]. These findings are consistent with previous research that suggests students from low SES, culturally diverse backgrounds may start school with limited exposure to narratives [40], which may have affected the length of their story retellings at time 1.…”

“…Other reasons for selecting informal measures may be due to convenience and cost [38, 39]. Informal measures reduce the bias of standardised norm-referenced assessments that over-identify students from culturally diverse or low socioeconomic backgrounds [40, 41]. For example, there is a growing body of evidence supporting the use of oral narrative tasks to appraise student language abilities in both monolingual and bilingual students [42, 43].…”

“…Numerous studies internationally have utilised text-level assessment tasks, such as oral narrative retell or generation tasks to appraise students’ oral language proficiency at school entry [40, 48, 49]. Indeed, several oral narrative measures are easily accessible and commonly used by Australian SLPs [38].…”

SLP-educator classroom collaboration: A review to inform reason-based practice

“…In the case of the vocabulary probe, the pattern was opposite: Although both clinically significant, the posttest gains were much larger for the low-than high-risk experimental groups and not observed in the control groups. The authors argued that classroom-based narrative language with embedded vocabulary instruction can lead to clinically significant change in narrative Gillam et al (2014), Spencer et al (2015) compared a whole class preschool narrative language program implemented in 15-20 minute lessons, 3 times per week for 4 weeks (n ¼ 36) to a business-asusual classroom (n ¼ 35) at a Head Start preschool. Significantly greater gains in the experimental group were found on program-specific outcome measures of narrative recall and story comprehension, but not story generation.…”