Enhancing the Oral Narratives of Children with Learning Disabilities

Revisiting Narrative Elaboration Training with an Ecologically Relevant Event

“…Prior laboratory-based research showed that the NE procedure encouraged children to provide a proportionately larger amount of information in the initial open-ended part of the interview, and importantly, this increase in correct information was not accompanied by a concomitant increase in the number of commission errors (Bowen & Howie, 2002;Brown & Pipe, 2003a, 2003bCamparo et al, 2001;Dorado & Saywitz, 2001;Nathanson et al, 2007;. The same pattern of results was found here with a naturally occurring stressful event.…”

“…Several empirical studies have assessed the recall of staged laboratory events using the NE procedure for both elementary school-aged children (Brown & Pipe, 2003a, 2003bCamparo, Wagner, & Saywitz, 2001;Nathanson, Crank, Saywitz, & Ruegg, 2007; and preschool-aged children (Bowen & Howie, 2002;Dorado & Saywitz, 2001). All of these staged events consisted of an interactive learning activity in a classroom or a laboratory event.…”

Narrative Abilities

“…The largest body of work in the area of narrative intervention has focused on explicit teaching of story grammar structure, with evidence of improved narrative performance in both preschool-aged and schoolaged children with and without language and learning difficulties (Babyak, Koorland, & Mathes, 2000;Hayward & Schneider, 2000;Nathanson, Crank, Saywitz, & Ruegg, 2007). Hayward and Schneider (2000) taught story grammar to preschool-aged children with LI over 12 sessions of approximately 20 min each, with tasks targeting the use of cue cards to identify story grammar components, identifying missing story parts, as well as organizing scrambled stories.…”

“…Research with older, school-aged children reveals that teaching the structure that underlies fictional narratives results in improved narrative abilities, as well as improvement in comprehension of what is read (Nathanson et al, 2007). Again, many studies have utilized some variation of a story mapping approach, including teaching-specific visual cues to represent key components of a fictional story (e.g., setting or characters, problem, and resolution).…”

Classroom-Based Narrative and Vocabulary Instruction: Results of an Early-Stage, Nonrandomized Comparison Study

“…In a study of older children, Nathanson, Crank, Saywitz, and Ruegg (2007) asked whether teaching story structure would retrospectively improve recall of a history lesson that had been taught 2 weeks earlier. Two weeks after participating in a history lesson, 39 children with learning disabilities in first through fifth grades were randomly assigned to a treatment group that received instruction in story structure (narrative elaboration treatment; NET) or to a control group.…”