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Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N = 1,037) contributed eight spoken language samples in four elicitation conditions: (a) expository generation, (b) expository retell, (c) narrative generation, and (d) narrative retell. Samples were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for number of total words, number of different words, mean length of utterance in words (MLUW), and number of clauses per communication unit (i.e., Subordination Index [SI]). Results: Narrative retell and expository generation conditions yielded the largest samples with the greatest lexical diversity when compared to narrative generation and expository retell. MLUW was higher in expository conditions, but mean SI was higher in narrative conditions. For both measures of syntax, narrative retell and expository generation yielded the highest mean scores. For each out-come, there were expected increases corresponding to grades; however, the differences faded between second and third grade. Conclusion: As a component of language assessments, clinicians' selection of language sampling procedures will impact the sample length, lexical diversity, utterance length, and syntactical complexity of the samples. [This article was published in "American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology."]

Many students struggle to acquire adequate reading comprehension and writing skills. Although word recognition and spelling are needed to fully actualize these skills, the oral language aspects of reading and writing can be taught and practiced without text. Oral storytelling is good for all students, but it may be essential for students with code-related disabilities and students with limited proficiency in the mainstream academic language of U.S. schools. The purpose of this article is to offer oral storytelling as a versatile classroom-based approach for advancing diverse students' reading and writing skills, as well as facilitating their social-emotional development. Based on an extensive theoretical and empirical literature, we propose seven strategies teachers can implement to infuse oral storytelling in their classrooms.

Narratives skills are associated with long-term academic and social benefits. While students with disabilities often struggle to produce complete and complex narratives, it remains unclear which aspects of narrative language are most indicative of disability. In this study, we examined the association between a variety of narrative contents and form indices and disability. Methodology involved drawing 50 K-3 students with Individual Education Programs (IEP) and reported language concerns from a large diverse sample (n = 1074). Fifty typically developing (TD) students were matched to the former group using propensity score matching based on their age, gender, grade, mother's education, and ethnicity. Narrative retells and generated language samples were collected and scored for Narrative Discourse and Sentence Complexity using a narrative scoring rubric. In addition, the number of different words (NDW), subordination index (SI), and percentage of grammatical errors (%GE) were calculated using computer software. Results of the Mixed effect model revealed that only Narrative Discourse had a significant effect on disability, with no significant effect revealed for Sentence Complexity, %GE, SI, and NDW. Additionally, Narrative Discourse emerged as the sole significant predictor of disability. At each grade, there Findings suggest that difficulty in Narrative Discourse is the most consistent predictor of disability.

The purpose of this cluster randomized group study was to investigate the effect of multitiered, dual-language instruction on children's oral language skills, including vocabulary, narrative retell, receptive and expressive language, and listening comprehension. The participants were 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 81) who were learning English and whose home language was Spanish. Across the school year, classroom teachers in the treatment group delivered large-group lessons in English to the whole class twice per week. For a Tier 2 intervention, the teachers delivered small-group lessons 4 days a week, alternating the language of intervention daily (first Spanish, then English). Group posttest differences were statistically significant, with moderate to large effect sizes favoring the treatment group on all the English proximal measures and on three of the four Spanish proximal measures. Treatment group advantages were observed on Spanish and English norm-referenced standardized measures of language (except vocabulary) and a distal measure of language comprehension. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED603565.]

The purpose of this cluster randomized group study was to investigate the effect of multitiered, dual-language instruction on children's oral language skills, including vocabulary, narrative retell, receptive and expressive language, and listening comprehension. The participants were 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 81) who were learning English and whose home language was Spanish. Across the school year, classroom teachers in the treatment group delivered large-group lessons in English to the whole class twice per week. For a Tier 2 intervention, the teachers delivered small-group lessons 4 days a week, alternating the language of intervention daily (first Spanish, then English). Group posttest differences were statistically significant, with moderate to large effect sizes favoring the treatment group on all the English proximal measures and on three of the four Spanish proximal measures. Treatment group advantages were observed on Spanish and English norm-referenced standardized measures of language (except vocabulary) and a distal measure of language comprehension.

Standards of academic performance place a high demand on students' English language. To help Spanish-speaking preschoolers who are developing English as a second language meet these demands, researchers recommend strengthening their first language to facilitate development of their second language. Head Start teachers and research assistants delivered 12 Spanish and 12 English language lessons to eight preschoolers in small groups. Lessons targeted storytelling and vocabulary and occurred 4 days a week for 20 min. A multiple-baseline experimental design across groups was used to examine the effect of the Spanish-English narrative intervention on children's retelling skills and a pretest posttest design without a control group documented children's acquisition of the target words. Results indicated that children made gains in English retelling while maintaining their already high Spanish retelling skills. Improvements in vocabulary were observed in English but not in Spanish.

Purpose: The purpose of this randomized controlled trial was to examine the effects of a multitiered system of language support (MTSLS) on kindergarteners' narrative retelling, personal stories, writing, and expository language. Method: Participants were 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the United States. Twenty-eight classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 337 students) or control (n = 349 students) conditions. The treatment group received 14 weeks of oral narrative language instruction using "Story Champs," a multitiered language program. Classroom teachers delivered large group (Tier 1) instruction for 15-20 min a day for 4 weeks. After this short-duration whole-class instruction, speech-language pathologists began small group "Story Champs" (Tier 2) intervention with a random sample of students who did not make adequate progress from the large group instruction (n = 49). These students received Tier 2 intervention for 20 min twice a week in addition to continued Tier 1 instruction. Results: Results indicated that the students in the treatment group had significantly higher scores on all outcome measures compared to the students in the control group. Analyses of outcomes from the 49 students who received Tier 2 intervention compared to a matching sample of at-risk control students revealed that the treatment group had significantly higher scores on narrative retells, personal stories, and expository retells. When compared to matched average-performing and advanced-performing control peers, the students who received Tier 2 intervention had significantly higher narrative retell scores and no longer had significantly lower personal story, expository, or writing scores. Conclusion: This effectiveness study demonstrated that MTSLS can lead to meaningful improvements in kindergarteners' oral and written language skills, even helping at-risk students catch up to high-achieving peers.

Despite research demonstrating the importance of language comprehension to later reading abilities, curriculum-based measures to assess language comprehension abilities in preschoolers remain lacking. The Assessment of Story Comprehension (ASC) features brief, child-relevant stories and a series of literal and inferential questions with a focus on causal and predictive inference skills surrounding the main story grammar components and a novel vocabulary word. Following an overview of the iterative development process and pilot studies, this article presents preliminary evidence of the fidelity of administration, reliability of scoring, alternate form reliability, and validity of the ASC. In all, 237 preschoolers, ages 3 to 5 years old, participated in this study. Fidelity of administration and scoring reliability averaged over 90%. Concurrent validity with two established language measures revealed correlations ranging from 0.67 to 0.81. Test-retest reliability and internal consistency also indicated high levels of reliability for this new tool; however, alternate form reliability results suggest further work is needed. Preliminary results indicate that the ASC holds promise as a viable curriculum-based measure that early childhood educators can use for monitoring preschoolers' progress in language comprehension.

Writing is a critical literacy skill that emerges in kindergarten. The research literature has only addressed transcription skills of kindergarteners and has failed to address text generation. The purpose of this action-research study was to investigate the effect of oral language instruction that focused on narrative text structures on kindergarten students' ability to generate written narrative text. We conducted a concurrent multiple baseline design across three groups of students with two participants in each group. Students received six instructional sessions that involved the teacher modeling a story and supporting the students while they retold and generated oral stories. Pictures and icons were used to represent story grammar elements, but were faded within session to facilitate independent storytelling. The oral language instruction had an immediate positive effect on the narrative quality of students' writing. Individual and overall effects were significant and maintained three to four weeks later. Findings suggest an efficient causal relation between oral language instruction and writing quality.

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether parallel measures of narrative-based listening comprehension and reading comprehension reflected the same construct and yielded comparable scores from a diverse sample of second- and third-grade students. One hundred ten students participated in this study. Method: Three listening and three reading comprehension narrative retells and subsequent responses to story questions and vocabulary questions were collected using the Narrative Language Measures Listening and Reading subtests of the CUBED assessment. Results: Results indicated a strong correlation between the listening comprehension and reading comprehension measures. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the listening and reading comprehension measures loaded onto one factor. Mean scores were not significantly different between the listening and reading comprehension measures, and the equipercentile analyses indicated that the two measures yielded scores that aligned with similar percentile rankings for a diverse sample of students, suggesting symmetry and equity. Conclusion: Oral narrative language retells and responses to story and vocabulary questions could potentially serve as proxy measures for reading comprehension for young students.

Purpose: Narrative interventions are a class of language interventions that involve the use of telling or retelling stories. Narrative intervention can be an efficient and versatile means of promoting a large array of academically and socially important language targets that improve children's access to general education curriculum and enhance their peer relations. The purpose of this tutorial is to supply foundational information about the importance of narratives and to offer recommendations about how to maximize the potential of narrative interventions in school-based clinical practice. Method: Drawing from decades of cognitive and linguistic research, a tutorial on narratives and narrative language is presented first. Ten principles that support the design and implementation of narrative interventions are described. Results: Clinicians can use narrative intervention to teach story grammar, complex language, vocabulary, inferencing, and social pragmatics. Storytelling, as an active intervention ingredient, promotes the comprehension and production of complex language. Conclusion: When narrative intervention is implemented following a set of principles drawn from research and extensive clinical experience, speech-language pathologists can efficiently and effectively teach a broad set of academically and socially meaningful skills to diverse students.

Purpose: Educators often use results from static norm-referenced vocabulary assessments to aid in the diagnosis of school-age children with a language disorder. However, research has indicated that many of these vocabulary assessments yield inaccurate, biased results, especially with culturally and linguistically diverse children. This study examined whether the use of a dynamic assessment of inferential word learning was more accurate at identifying bilingual (English/Spanish-speaking) children with a language disorder when compared to static measures of vocabulary. Method: Thirty-one bilingual Spanish/English school-age children--21 children with typical language and 10 children with a language disorder--ages 5;9-9;7 (years;months) were administered traditional static vocabulary assessments and a dynamic assessment of inferential word learning that used a test-teach-test design. Results: Discriminant analysis and logistic regression indicated that the combined posttest scores and modifiability ratings from the dynamic assessment generated 90%-100% sensitivity and 90.5%-95.2% specificity, which were superior to the static vocabulary tests. Conclusion: These preliminary findings suggest that dynamic assessment of inferential word learning may be an effective method for accurately identifying diverse children with a language disorder.

This early-stage feasibility study investigated the effects of a multitiered oral narrative language intervention on oral language, reading comprehension, and writing. Twenty-eight second-grade students participated in this quasi-experimental control group study with assignment at the classroom level. The independent variable was large- and small-group oral narrative language intervention that required students to retell increasingly complex stories that were strategically crafted to include academic language typically found in grade-level reading material. Story grammar, causal adverbial subordinate clauses, elaborated noun phrases, adverbs, and the acquisition of word meanings through context were explicitly taught. Students' performance on proximal measures of oral narrative retells, as well as distal measures of reading comprehension and writing, was assessed at pretest and posttest. Statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups were found on all outcome measures using nonparametric analyses. Large- and small-group multitiered oral narrative instruction improved not only oral narrative language but also reading comprehension and written composition.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of a phonological awareness (PA) intervention, designed for Tier 2 instruction in a Response to Intervention (RTI) model, delivered to small groups of preschoolers. Method: A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention on low-income preschool children's PA skills. A trained interventionist delivered small group sessions 3 to 4 days a week and ensured children received frequent opportunities to respond and contingent feedback. Participants received 28 to 36 lessons that lasted about 10 min each and focused on PA and alphabet knowledge. Initiation of intervention was staggered across 3 triads, and 7 children completed the study. Results: The intervention produced consistent gains on weekly progress monitoring assessments of the primary outcome measure for first sound identification (First Sound Fluency). Most children also demonstrated gains on other measures of PA and alphabet knowledge. Conclusions: Results provide support for the application of a small group intervention consistent with an RTI framework and document the potential benefits of the intervention to learners who need early literacy instruction beyond the core curriculum.

This early efficacy study examined the effects of an automated storybook intervention designed to promote school readiness among at-risk prekindergarten children. Story Friends is a small-group intervention in which vocabulary and question-answering lessons are embedded in a series of storybooks.A randomized group design with an embedded single-case experimental design was used to examine treatment effects. Eighteen children from public prekindergarten programs serving families with low income were randomly assigned to the Story Friends treatment or a business-as-usual comparison. Participants in both groups completed measures of vocabulary and comprehension approximately monthly. Participants in the treatment group completed measures of instructional content for each book as part of the embedded single-case experimental design. Story Friends participants had significantly higher scores on measures of vocabulary than the comparison group and effect sizes were large, whereas more modest effects were shown for comprehension measures. Observations of treatment fidelity indicate that this intervention has the potential to be implemented with high fidelity in preschool classrooms. Results show a feasible means of teaching pre-K children challenging vocabulary that has the potential to facilitate later literacy development.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how well a kindergarten dynamic assessment of decoding predicts future reading difficulty at 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade and to determine whether the dynamic assessment improves the predictive validity of traditional static kindergarten reading measures. Method: With a small variation in sample size by grade, approximately 370 Caucasian and Hispanic students were administered a 3-min dynamic assessment of decoding and static measures of letter identification and phonemic awareness at the beginning of kindergarten. Oral reading fluency was then assessed at the end of Grades 2-5. In this prospective, longitudinal study, predictive validity was estimated for the Caucasian and Hispanic students by examining the amount of variance the static and dynamic assessments explained and by referring to area under the curve and sensitivity and specificity values. Results: The dynamic assessment accounted for variance in reading ability over and above the static measures, with fair to good area under the curve values and sensitivity and specificity. Classification accuracy worsened when the static measures were included as predictor measures. The results of this study indicate that a very brief dynamic assessment can predict with approximately 75%-80% accuracy, which kindergarten students will have difficulty in learning to decode up to 6 years into the future. Conclusions: Dynamic assessment of decoding is a promising approach to identifying future reading difficulty of young kindergarten students, mitigating the cultural and linguistic bias found in traditional static early reading measures.

Purpose: Despite literature showing a correlation between oral language and written language ability, there is little evidence documenting a causal connection between oral and written language skills. The current study examines the extent to which oral language instruction using narratives impacts students' writing skills. Method: Following multiple baseline design conventions to minimize threats to internal validity, 3 groups of 1st-grade students were exposed to staggered baseline, intervention, and maintenance conditions. During the intervention condition, groups received 6 sessions of small-group oral narrative instruction over 2 weeks. Separated in the school day from the instruction, students wrote their own stories, forming the dependent variable across baseline, intervention, and maintenance conditions. Written stories were analyzed for story structure and language complexity using a narrative scoring flow chart based on current academic standards. Results: Corresponding to the onset of oral narrative instruction, all but 1 student showed meaningful improvements in story writing. All 4 students, for whom improvements were observed and maintenance data were available, continued to produce written narratives above baseline levels once the instruction was withdrawn. Conclusions: Results suggest that narrative instruction delivered exclusively in an oral modality had a positive effect on students' writing. Implications include the efficiency and inclusiveness of oral language instruction to improve writing quality, especially for young students.

Implementation considerations should be integrated into the iterative development of educational innovations. The purpose of this design-based implementation research (DBIR) was to identify intervention components worthy of revision, examine the feasibility of a video manual and document barriers to the implementation of a multi-tiered dual-language instructional curriculum. Six teachers implemented the curriculum and provided feedback via structured interviews. Although four of the six teachers reported the intervention to be highly feasible, multi-tiered instruction did not align with the beliefs of two teachers. Teachers' feedback combined with child-level narrative and vocabulary outcomes led to curriculum revisions and to the creation of additional implementation supports. Findings suggest system-level barriers influence the sustainability of multi-tiered instruction in early childhood settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of vocabulary instruction embedded in the narrative intervention on the immediate and retained definitional knowledge of taught words for first graders at risk for language-related reading difficulties. Method: We employed a repeated acquisition design with innovative quality features and supplemental statistics with 11 treatment students and three control students. In the context of the school's multitiered system of supports, treatment students received 30-min small group interventions, 4 days a week for 12 weeks. Intervention involved story retelling and personal story generation lessons, both of which emphasized the learning and practicing of target vocabulary words in each story. Pre- and postprobes of the taught definitions were conducted every week. Results: According to visual analysis conventions of single-case research, there was a consistent pattern of improvement from pre- to postprobes for all treatment participants, but for none of the control participants. Retention was also consistently observed, when measured at Week 13. Supplemental statistics confirmed that large effects were associated with the intervention. Conclusion: Vocabulary instruction embedded in narrative intervention led to meaningful acquisition and retention of taught vocabulary for students at risk of language-based reading difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge are fundamental building blocks for literacy development. We identified preschoolers with persistent delays in these skills and evaluated the efficacy of a supplemental curriculum to remediate deficits in early literacy skills. Method: Using a cluster design, 21 classrooms were randomly assigned to early literacy versus language intervention conditions. Sixty children identified through fall semester assessments of phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge were enrolled in small-group instruction. Teachers completed eLearning modules, used a digital platform to enter data and facilitate data-based decision making, received practice-based coaching, and delivered 12 weekly units of an early literacy curriculum. Comparison teachers delivered similarly administered small-group language instruction. Results: Large effects were evident for letter sounds, phoneme segmentation, first sound, and first sound fluency measures (d = 0.92, 4.77, 1.15, and 1.50, respectively), and nonsignificant, small effects for letter naming and blending measures (d = 0.26 and 0.27). Discussion: This early literacy intervention package had practical benefits, with 90% of experimental group preschoolers exceeding the phonemic awareness benchmark for beginning kindergarten compared to 45% in the comparison group, for example. Providing preschool teachers with tools and support for implementing a tiered approach to early literacy intervention holds promise for producing impressive gains in skills required for children to succeed in later schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the classification accuracy of a concentrated English narrative dynamic assessment (DA) for identifying language impairment (LI). Method: Forty-two Spanish-English bilingual kindergarten to third-grade children (10 LI and 32 with no LI) were administered two 25-min DA test-teach-test sessions. Pre- and posttest narrative retells were scored in real time. Using a structured intervention approach, examiners taught children missing story grammar elements and subordination. A posttest was administered using a parallel story. Results: Four classification predictors were analyzed: posttest scores, gain scores, modifiability ratings, and teaching duration. Discriminant function analysis indicated that an overall modifiability rating was the best classifier, with 100% sensitivity and 88% specificity after 1 DA session and 100% sensitivity and specificity after 2 sessions. Any 2 combinations of posttest scores, modifiability ratings, and teaching duration for just 1 session resulted in sensitivity and specificity rates over 90%. Receiver operating characteristic analyses were used to identify clinically usable cutoff points. Post hoc exploration indicated that similar results could be obtained after only one 5-10-min teaching cycle, potentially further abbreviating the DA process. Conclusion: Concentrated English narrative DA results in high classification accuracy for bilingual children with and without LI. This efficient version of DA is amenable to clinical use.

A disproportionate percentage of culturally and linguistically diverse students have difficulties with language-related skills that affect their academic success. Early and intensive language instruction may greatly improve these students' language skills, yet there is not sufficient research available to assist educators and school psychologists in distinguishing between language disabilities and language differences. Because of this, culturally and linguistically diverse children often receive special education services several years later than other children. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of a multitiered intervention on the narrative language skills of seven culturally diverse preschool students. We also examined the preventive impact the narrative language intervention had on special education referrals. Results of the multiple baseline design across participants revealed that a positive trend emerged in retells and personal stories from baseline to intervention for all seven participants. At follow-up, scores remained consistently above baseline. The intervention had a preventive impact for six preschoolers, and only one preschooler was referred for a psychoeducational evaluation. These findings support the use of narrative intervention to prevent erroneous referrals of culturally and linguistically diverse students.

Oral narratives are a commonly used, meaningful means of communication that reflects academic language. New state curriculum standards include narrative-related language expectations for young school-age children, including story grammar and complex language. This article provides a review of preschool narrative-based language intervention studies, with special attention to how the intervention accelerated young children's story grammar and complex language beyond developmental expectations, meeting or even exceeding recently adopted state language standards. In addition, we provide an overview of a narrative-based language intervention used with culturally and linguistically diverse preschoolers to prepare them for meeting the language standards in elementary school. Evidence supports a conclusion that personal-themed stories that are developmentally and socially appropriate for preschoolers can strengthen children's use of mainstream story grammar and complex language, which will be an asset to them in elementary school.

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the classification accuracy of early static prereading measures and early dynamic assessment reading measures administered to 600 kindergarten students. At the beginning of kindergarten, all of the participants were administered two commonly used static prereading measures. The participants were then administered either a dynamic assessment featuring an onset-rime decoding strategy or a dynamic assessment featuring a sound-by-sound strategy. At the end of first grade, those same participants' reading ability was assessed using multiple reading measures. Results indicated that the dynamic assessments yielded significantly higher classification accuracy over the static measures, but that the classification accuracy of the two dynamic assessments did not differ significantly. Sensitivity for the static measures was less than 80%, and specificity ranged from 33% to 51%. The sensitivity and specificity for the dynamic assessments was greater than 80% for all children, with the exception of specificity for the Hispanic children, which was at or greater than 70%. Results also indicated that the combination of static and dynamic measures did not improve the classification accuracy over the dynamic assessments alone. Dynamic assessment appears to be a promising approach to classifying young children at risk for future reading difficulty.