In a multilingual country such as India, the probability that clinicians may not have command over different languages used by aphasic patients is very high. Since formal tests in different languages are limited, assessment of people from diverse linguistic backgrounds presents speech- language pathologists with many challenges. With a view to…

Reliable criterion-referenced assessments are critical as one of the first steps in evidence-based practice. These assessments must also be valid. One of the most important skills to measure in school-age children with language disabilities is the ability to organize language in the form of narratives. The purpose of this paper is to describe a…

This author has been a "reader girl" since the third grade, when she first read "Trumpet of the Swan" on her own. Fourth grade brought C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and Joan Aiken. Fifth grade was Cynthia Voigt, Anne McCaffrey, and Robin McKinley. And so it continued with Ellen Raskin, Patricia McKillip, and L. M. Montgomery, a veritable battalion…

This article comes from a speech that Richard Peck gave at the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Spring Conference in 2007. At our request, he prepared this excerpt for "English Journal" readers.

Background: This study examined the ability of 78 children (aged 9-12 years) with an intellectual disability (ID) to provide a narrative account of a staged event they had participated in four days earlier. Method: The children were interviewed using open-ended questions. The quality of their responses (using a story grammar framework) was…

Books can be a rich source of learning for children and adults alike. In the present study, the contribution of shared reading and parent literacy to a variety of child outcomes was tested. Child outcomes included measures of expressive vocabulary, morphological and syntax comprehension, and narrative ability (story grammar, cohesion, and language…

As a professor of English at Diablo Valley College in northern California where she teaches a variety of writing and literature courses, the author finds her students' essays so often lack not only shape and drama, but the ring of emotional truth as well. Their "life" stories are lifeless and their "true" stories sound somehow…

The ability to narrate a story is fundamental to the development of overall communicative competence and involves the coordination of a variety of knowledge structures and linguistic abilities. In this study, the narrative discourse abilities of four children who use AAC are described in the context of five tasks designed to elicit a spectrum of…

Extrapolated data from a 1990 study of 54-month-old children to examine attachment representations. Subjects' story completions were scored for idea units and scriptedness, revealing advanced validity compared to those of younger subjects. Concluded that analysis of cognitive variables may be used to understand attachment representations and their…

Purpose: This study examined the structural development of African American preschoolers' narratives. It also investigated the effect of background variables (e.g., gender, maternal education, stimulation and responsiveness of the home environment, and whether or not the child lived in poverty) on the children's narratives. Method: Sixty-five…

This paper is an exploration of the philosophical and semiotic implications of educational acts of meaning-making that are mediated through narrative inquiry. The paper discusses the risks of a narrative view of teacher education as it is related to the "I"--philosophy tradition of Subjective Idealism. Indeed, modelling the Self may be…

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of language on Spanish-English bilingual children's production of narrative samples elicited in two ways. Method: Twelve bilingual (Spanish-English-speaking) children ranging in age from 4;0 (years;months) to 6;11 who were fluent speakers of English as a second language produced two narratives--one…

This study investigated the premise that action, manifested here through pretend play, is a semiotic arena that can enhance narrative development. It was hypothesized that children would produce structurally more complex narratives in play-prompted elicitation than in direct elicitation conditions, and that this competence would increase with age.…

The study compared linguistic analyses of 27 language disabled and 30 normal language children in grades 1-6. The first procedure, cohesive tie analysis, examined surface characteristics of a text for connections between lingustic components that contribute to coherence; the second procedure, story grammar, examined underlying story organization…

A substantial number of 5-7 year old children experience delayed language development which threatens their progress in school, although they have not been placed on speech and language therapy caseloads. Children with delayed language development typically have a limited ability to understand and tell stories. Intervention to develop the oral…