The Efficacy of Story Champs for Improving Oral Language in Third-Grade Spanish–English Bilingual Students With Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

Purpose: We investigated the efficacy of Story Champs for improving oral language in third-grade Spanish–English bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We implemented a concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants single-case design with four bilingual Spanish–English third-grade students with DLD. Treatment was carried out over 12 sessions with approximately two sessions per week. Maintenance sessions were conducted 1, 2, and 4 weeks postintervention. Participants were explicitly taught story grammar elements, causal and temporal connections, and modifiers within story retells and personal narratives. Dependent variables were story grammar, grammatical complexity, modifiers and listening comprehension within story retells, and story grammar and grammatical complexity within personal narratives. Outcome measures were assessed at the end of every baseline, intervention, and maintenance session using the Narrative Language Measures–Listening (NLM-L). Results: Visual analyses for outcome measures suggested slight increases in scores on the NLM-L during intervention accompanied by marked variability. Within-case analyses of story retell performance suggested an intervention effect on story grammar for two participants and on grammatical complexity and modifier use for one participant. For personal narratives, within-case analyses of personal narrative performance suggested an intervention effect on story grammar for one participant. Conclusions: Overall, Story Champs demonstrated efficacy for improving story grammar use in story retells for three out of four participants. It did not show efficacy for improving grammatical complexity, modifier use, or listening comprehension within story retells, nor did it show efficacy for improving story grammar and grammatical complexity within personal narratives. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26053033