Intervention to facilitate Narrative Development

Narrative skill is identified as a critical link to successful school achievement. A lot of descriptive studies have been done in this field but intervention studies are rare. The present research used a new hybrid intervention method which covered three domains of narrative development, linguistic complexity, evaluative information, and story grammar. Thirty children (mean age 4;6 years) participated in this study. Before and after the intervention, the children's skills were evaluated for language and in three different tasks of narrative ability. Fifteen children were assigned into the intervention group and the other 15 children who were closely matched with the intervention group on their pretest languages skills served as the control group. In six weeks, the 15 intervention children received 12 intervention sessions which lasted for 30 minutes each time. After the intervention, the intervention group showed improvement in all three narratives tasks that were employed. Specifically, they recalled more information and used more complex sentences in the story retelling task.