Abstract
The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on kindergarten students' written expository discourse. The participants included 270 participants from a larger sample of 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the upper Midwest geographical region of the United States. Participants received contextualized language intervention using Story Champs narrative intervention procedures. Tier-1 treatment groups received large group instruction from their classroom teacher who followed Story Champs procedures. Students whose oral narrative retell scores did not improve following the initial four weeks of treatment were assigned to receive additional small group intervention (Tier-2). Tier-2 intervention also followed Story Champs procedures but was led by the schools' speech-language pathologists rather than classroom teachers. Expository writing samples were collected before and after intervention and following the treatment period. These writing samples were analyzed for expository language complexity and text structure. Pretest and posttest writing samples were evaluated on measures of expository language complexity and text structure using the Expository Language Measures (ELM) flow chart. Typical language learning students in the Tier-1 treatment condition were compared with typical language learning students in the control condition and showed statistically greater performance on measures of written expository language complexity, but not on measures of written expository text structure. Additionally, students with weaker language learning ability in the Tier-2 treatment group were compared to students with similar language learning difficulty in the control group. Analyses revealed no significant differences on measures of written expository language complexity nor written expository text structure for these students with weaker language learning ability. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-tiered oral narrative intervention in improving written expository language complexity for typical language learning kindergarten students. Furthermore, this study indicates the need for further investigations of interventions specifically aimed at addressing expository discourse in younger students.
Degree
MS
College and Department
David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders
Rights
https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Woods, Shaylee Rae, "A Randomized Control Trial Examining the Effects of a Multi-Tiered Oral Narrative Language Intervention on Kindergarten Expository Writing" (2022). Theses and Dissertations. 9878.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/9878
Date Submitted
2022-04-05
Document Type
Thesis
Handle
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12716
Keywords
oral language, narrative, writing, multi-tiered intervention, kindergarten
Language
english