Steamsational Writing

Providing young children with rich environments for writing has been a continuing quest for teachers in the early grades. This chapter investigates the use of Bee-bot robots as a means of creating a stimulating environment that engages second graders in the writing process and learning story grammar elements. Researchers met with the students weekly for an hour over six weeks. In the first week, students wrote an initial story and learned the basics of programming a Bee-bot robot. In subsequent weeks, students listened to a story set in the context of the Bee-bot mat, reviewed vocabulary words, planned a path for their robot, wrote a short story, and executed their robot program. There was a significant difference overall between the baseline story and the final story, and between the initial rating of each of the story grammar elements and the final rating of the elements, with the exception of Character.

Informal Written Language Analysis Methods: Case Examples of Adults With Traumatic Brain Injury

Purpose: Written expression challenges following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in adults have received little clinical attention but can substantially affect quality of life and the success of reintegration efforts. Assessment tools and procedures are lacking despite the likelihood of post-TBI problems with microstructure (e.g., productivity, spelling accuracy) and macrostructure (e.g., topic adherence, organization) aspects of written language. The lack of standardized procedures forces reliance on informal methods to determine writing strengths and challenges. Method: A combination of assessment procedures allowed for evaluation of the productivity and efficiency, adherence to writing conventions (e.g., spelling, sentence structure, punctuation), and macrostructure organization (e.g., story grammar, topic adherence) of written narratives collected from five adults with TBI. Results: Use of multiple assessment methods revealed disparate writing challenges across the five case examples. The differing writing profiles underscore the necessity of evaluating multiple aspects of written narratives. Conclusions: The described analysis methods can help clinicians determine areas of strength and challenge in written work generated by adults with TBI. Examination of multiple aspects of writing is key to garnering a comprehensive appraisal of post-TBI writing.

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

The effect of workshop training on rater variability in children’s oral narrative assessment

Oral narrative assessments are important for diagnosis of language disorders in school-age children so scoring needs to be reliable and consistent. This study explored the impact of training on the variability of story grammar scores in children’s oral narrative assessments scored by multiple raters. Fifty-one speech pathologists and 19 final-year speech pathology students attended training workshops on oral narrative assessment scoring and analysis. Participants scored two oral narratives prompted by two different story stimuli and produced by two children of differing ages. Demographic information, story grammar scores and a confidence survey were collected pre- and post-training. The total story grammar score changed significantly for one of the two oral narratives. A significant effect was observed for rater years of experience and the change in total story grammar scores post training, with undergraduate students showing the greatest change. Two story grammar elements, character and attempt, changed significantly for both stories, with an overall trend of increased element scores post-training. Confidence ratings also increased post-training. Findings indicated that training via an interactive workshop can reduce rater variability when using researcher-developed narrative scoring systems.

The Effect of Narrative Language Intervention on the Language Skills of Children With Hearing Loss

Purpose Narrative intervention has not been extensively investigated with children with hearing loss, but it has been shown to improve a broad range of language skills of children with a variety of disabilities and language needs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of narrative language intervention on the narrative retelling skills and vocabulary use of children with hearing loss. Method A multiple baseline design (for retelling) and a repeated acquisition design (for vocabulary) were used to fulfill the purpose of the study. Participants included two children ages 5 and 9 years diagnosed with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, fitted to an amplification device. Each child received one 70-min session of individual narrative language intervention per week for at least 6 weeks that focused on teaching less common vocabulary words in addition to story grammar and complex sentences. Results Both participants demonstrated weekly increases in narrative retell scores and repeated pretest to posttest gains in the use of targeted vocabulary. Evidenced through visual analysis, both participants showed some growth in retell once intervention was introduced, with at least a modest upward trend each week. Moreover, vocabulary use scores, collected directly after intervention, showed both participants improved vocabulary use in familiar and untrained contexts. Conclusions Results suggest narrative language intervention improved the narrative retell ability and vocabulary use of children with hearing loss. Narrative intervention is a promising approach for promoting the language skills of children with hearing loss, but this finding requires replication.

Main Concept, Sequencing, and Story Grammar Analyses of Cinderella Narratives in a Large Sample of Persons with Aphasia

Recently, a multilevel analytic approach called Main Concept, Sequencing, and Story Grammar (MSSG) was presented along with preliminary normative information. MSSG analyses leverage the strong psychometrics and rich procedural knowledge of both main concept analysis and story grammar component coding, complementing it with easy-to-obtain sequencing information for a rich understanding of discourse informativeness and macrostructure. This study is the next critical step for demonstrating the clinical usefulness of MSSG’s six variables (main concept composite, sequencing, main concept+sequencing, essential story grammar components, total episodic components, and episodic complexity) for persons with aphasia (PWAs). We present descriptive statistical information for MSSG variables for a large sample of PWAs and compare their performance to a large sample of persons not brain injured (PNBIs). We observed significant differences between PWAs and PNBIs for all MSSG variables. These differences occurred at the omnibus group level and for each aphasia subtype, even for PWAs with very mild impairment that is not detected with standardized aphasia assessment. Differences between PWAs and PNBIs were also practically significant, with medium to large effect sizes observed for nearly all aphasia subtypes and MSSG variables. This work deepens our understanding of discourse informativeness and macrostructure in PWAs and further develops an efficient tool for research and clinical use. Future research should investigate ways to expand MSSG analyses and to improve sensitivity and specificity.