Oral narrative intervention for children with mixed reading disability

Abstract

Ten children (aged between 7;11 and 9;2) with mixed reading disability participated in an oral narrative intervention programme that focused on enhancing children's story structure knowledge. The participants had all demonstrated persistent reading and oral narrative comprehension and production difficulties in a two-year longitudinal study prior to the intervention. A non-equivalent pretest—posttest control group design was used in which one group of five children was randomly selected to receive the intervention immediately and the other group of five children received the intervention delayed. A speech language therapist implemented the intervention in small group sessions twice weekly until 12 hours of intervention were completed. The results indicated significant treatment effects for oral narrative comprehension performance. Despite this improvement in children's ability to answer comprehension questions relating to story structure elements, there was little change in oral narrative production performance as a result of the intervention, and transfer to reading comprehension was not evident.