Effects of a Narrative Intervention on Story Retelling in At-Risk Young Children

The purpose of this multiple baseline study across participants was to examine a narrative retell intervention with guided self-monitoring on narrative macrostructure skills in low-income African American young children at risk for language disorders. Three target 4-year-old children in a mixed-age kindergarten class of nine students participated in the intervention. Intervention sessions lasting 15 to 20 min, 3 days a week were delivered in small groups. Children were explicitly taught story grammar components, identified story grammar components in stories read aloud, practiced retelling stories, and listened to recordings of their retells to identify story grammar components included and omitted. All three children demonstrated improved narrative retell skills throughout the intervention phase and maintained those skills 2 weeks after the intervention ended. Intervention results and social validity findings support the use of combined story grammar intervention and technology-supported self-monitoring as a promising and feasible early literacy instructional practice.