Cindy Lee , Group B

Case 1 Annie, 6 year-old girl (Communication disorder)
This paper consists of a precise analysis about the intervention, effectives, personal evaluation and suggestions on the article about using narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) with children who have Specific Language Impairment, SLI (Swanson, Fey, Mills & Hood, 2005). This six weeks program of narrative based intervention was conducted with ten children aged seven to eight years old with SLI. Each intervention session targeted story content and sentence from using story retell and generation tasks. The article stated that throughout the program, the children showed increase confidence in their narrative production skills.
Intervention
The intervention sessions were conducted individually for each participant, each fifty minutes, held three times a week over the six weeks. There are three intermediate goals selected based on each child’s conversational and narrative samples. The targeted goals included post-modification of nouns, subordinating conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, and verb phrase elaboration. The materials used were twenty six novel stories. The specific stories selected for each child were determined by the child’s syntactic goals. All stories contained each of the narrative components, setting, characters, problem, resolution, complication and ending. Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts was used to determine the number of total words.
The procedure of the NBLI started with a warm-up activity. The child retold the story from the story retell-imitation task based on the previous experiences ad practice from the previous session. Next is the story retell-imitation task. In this task, the child was asked to retell a story that contained multiple examples of the morphosyntactic or discourse-level target form on a component-by-component basis. The clinician highlighted the story’s main theme to enhance the child’s interest and to trigger the child’s prior knowledge of the story’s semantic details.
After which a short speech impairment drill was designed to provide the child with exposure to and production practice with his or her grammatical target and to require close attention to clinician models. The child would mimic the contrastive sentence and if achievable the targeted sentence. Followed by a story generation task the child selected a single picture from a choice of two or more. He or she was supposed to describe the scene and characters, and the clinician recapped the child’s introduction including all missing relevant information. At the end of the session, the child received a copy of the story and related illustrations and practiced retelling the story at home.
Effectiveness
After these experimental sessions were carried out, the research findings were that Participants made statically and clinically significant changes in their children’s story composition abilities. Conversely, there were no gains in narrative abilities, syntactic and working memory, and outcome measures. Also, the children also faced some difficulties paying attention to the entire activity. However, the children gained improvement on their self confidence in their narrative production skills.
Personal Evaluation
My personal thoughts were that children did benefit from this intervention. Although it was not a full success, this intervention did enhance the children’s confidence in their narrative production skills. I believe that for children with communication difficulties, it is extremely important for them to gain the confidence to speak. For Annie, she lacks of the confidence to accept her facial deformities. Hence I feel that she needs to gain the confidence to speak up and express her thoughts verbally.
Suggestions
However, there are some suggestions on how the teacher can modify this intervention to suit the learning needs of Annie. I suppose the duration of fifty minutes is too long for a six year old child. The duration can be about thirty minutes and the entire class can be included in this program. Young children can gain verbalization skills, creativity and other skills in storytelling. In addition, the teacher can extend children’s learning by allowing them to reenact the story. This also builds children’s confidence. Moreover, the teacher can pick stories which tell the children the importance of acceptance. This will enable the rest of the children to learn how to accept Annie as who she is.

Reference:
Swanson, L., Fey, M., Mills, C., & Hood, L. (200). Use of Narrative-Based Language Intervention With Children Who Have Specific Language Impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14(2), 131-143. Retrieved from Education Research Complete database.