An Examination of the Quality of Narratives Produced by Children with Language Disorders

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools

Volume

27

Issue

1

Publication Date

1996

First Page

48

Last Page

56

Abstract

A team of regular and special educators used a holistic scoringprocedure to rate the overall quality of spoken and writtennarratives produced by students with language disorders andtheir age-, language-, and reading-matched peers. Students withlanguage disorders earned significantly lower holistic scoresthan their age-matched peers. However, their holistic scoreswere similar to the scores earned by their language- and reading-matchedpeers. Correlations between holistic scores and structural measuresof language revealed that quality judgments were moderatelyrelated to textual-level measures of form and content but wereunrelated to sentence-level measures of form and content. Holisticscoring is shown to have clinical and research utility as ameans for socially validating the effects of language disorderson storytelling. Clinicians who want to influence the overallquality of their students' stories may wish to focus their interventionon textual-level narrative features.

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