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

A team of regular and special educators used a holistic scoring procedure to rate the overall quality of spoken and written narratives produced by students with language disorders and their age-, language-, and reading-matched peers. Students with language disorders earned significantly lower holistic scores than their age-matched peers. However, their holistic scores were similar to the scores earned by their language- and reading-matched peers. Correlations between holistic scores and structural measures of language revealed that quality judgments were moderately related to textual-level measures of form and content but were unrelated to sentence-level measures of form and content. Holistic scoring is shown to have clinical and research utility as a means for socially validating the effects of language disorders on storytelling. Clinicians who want to influence the overall quality of their students' stories may wish to focus their intervention on textual-level narrative features.

KEY WORDS: narrative, language disorder, discourse, assessment, holistic scoring

Submitted on June 28, 1994
Accepted on January 20, 1995

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