Teaching language organization to a child with pervasive developmental disorder: a case study

Abstract

This investigation determined the effects of a treatment programme, The Expression Connection (1991), on the language organization of a firstgrade male child with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). The methodology consisted of teaching the child story grammar components and the associated syntax requisite of their use. Treatment was conducted twice a week for 12 weeks. Results revealed a significant improvement in the complexity of the child's oral stories. Results with relation to the role of language organization in production of oral narratives and the efficacy of this programme with children with PDD were discussed in comparison to children with specific language impairment.

Teaching story grammar components to increase oral narrative ability: A group intervention study

“…The ability to tell a story is an important skill. Many professionals believe that the ability to tell a story involves both higher-level language and cognitive abilities (Klecan-Aker and Gill, 2005; Paul et al, 1996; Westby, 1989) and requires a more abstract grasp of language structure than conversational discourse. Specifically, the concise syntactic style, complexity of sentence structures, rare and rich vocabulary, focus on unfamiliar and abstract topics, appreciation of story grammar, and decontextualization (distancing from immediate experience) increase the linguistic demands of the narrative genre (Roth, 2000; Silliman, 1989; Silliman and Wilkinson, 1991).…”

“…This difficulty could be due to the fact that children with such impairments tend to have small vocabularies characterized by short, frequently-occurring words (Paul, 1995), high frequency use of nonspecific words (Wiig and Semel, 1984), fewer complex sentences, and less elaboration of noun phrases (Paul, 1995). They also have specific challenges with several aspects of spontaneous story generation that include problems with the use of story grammar components, inappropriate use of cohesive ties, and delayed developmental story levels (Feagans and Short, 1984; Klecan-Aker and Gill, 2005; Liles et al, 1995). Thus, many of these children struggle in the classroom and require intervention that targets comprehension and production of narrative stories to increase academic participation and overall success (Fey et al, 2003; Swanson et al, 2005).…”

“…Klecan-Aker and colleagues (Klecan-Aker et al, 1997; Klecan-Aker and Gill, 2005) completed two small studies in which they looked at improving oral narrative ability in children with specific language learning difficulties. In both of these studies they found that teaching these children to structure the language in narrative form (e.g.…”

The effects of dynamic assessment and gender on EFL learners' oral narrative task performance

“…The capabilities essential for production and comprehension of narratives constitute well-established linguistic and cognitive skills (Klecan-Aker & Gill, 2005;Klecan-Aker & Colson, 2009), due to the fact that the storyteller is expected to use a combination of mental, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge types (Le, Coelho, Mazeiko, & Grafman, 2011). More specifically, the complicated nature of narratives results from the correspondence between the narrative's structure, meaning, lexical items, and relevant context.…”

Dialogicity and narrativity in pedagogical interaction in the classroom. A proposal for analysing teacher discourse in the teaching process / Dialogicidad y narratividad en la interacción pedagógica del aula. Una propuesta para el análisis del discurso docente en el proceso de enseñanza

“…The dialogic perspective has become more widespread in educational research with studies of pedagogical communicative exchanges between the teacher and students during the teaching-learning process (Mehan, 1998;Mercer, 2008;Van Compernolle & Williams, 2012). The narrative tradition emerged from studying narrativity in communicative exchange processes between mothers and children (Bruner, 2002;Nelson, 1996) and was later shifted to the field of education in an effort to assess its impact on student learning (Carretero & Castorina, 2010;Klecan-Aker & Gill, 2005;Mehta et al, 2005;Menti & Rosemberg, 2016;Stein et al, 2020).…”