Description:

Co-Principal Investigators: Gillam, Ronald; Gillam, Sandra Laing; Vaughn, Sharon

Purpose: Narration has been shown to be a foundational skill for literacy development in school-age children. Elementary teachers routinely conduct classroom lessons that focus on reading decoding and comprehension, but they rarely provide instruction in oral narration. The research team designed the Supporting Knowledge of Language and Literacy (SKILL) intervention program to teach students about story structure and higher-level aspects of academic language. The purpose of this project was to rigorously evaluate the SKILL program in an efficacy trial and to determine whether training in oral narration impacted the use of higher-level language, reading comprehension, and written language. If so, teachers in the primary grades may want to devote more time to teaching story structure and the higher-level language skills that are important for comprehending and producing complex stories.

Project Activities: The researchers conducted a multi-site, multi-cohort randomized controlled trial to compare the Supporting Knowledge of Language and Literacy (SKILL) intervention program to a business-as-usual counterfactual condition. Teachers provided SKILL to small groups of 2 to 4 students in 36 lessons that were 30-minute long across a 3-month period. The researchers administered measures of reading comprehension, oral narration, and written narration before randomization, immediately after treatment, and 5 months after treatment ended. They then performed multi-level modeling with students nested within teachers and teachers nested within schools to compare the outcomes of the treatment and control groups and structural equation modeling to assess moderation and mediation.

Key Outcomes:

• Students who received the SKILL treatment significantly outperformed students in the business-as-usual (BAU) condition on measures of oral narrative comprehension and production immediately after treatment and at follow-up 5 months later (Gillam et al, 2023).
• Improvements in oral narration generalized to a measure of written narration at post-test and the treatment advantage was maintained at follow-up (Gillam et al, 2023).
• Grade level did not moderate effects for oral narration, but it did for reading comprehension, with a higher impact for students in grades three and four (Gillam et al, 2023).

Structured Abstract

Setting: This study was conducted in urban and rural school districts in Utah and Texas.

Sample: Participants included 357 students who were at-risk for language and literacy difficulties in grades 1 through 4 in 13 schools across 7 school districts. A large percentage of the 357 participating students were Latino (57 percent) with the remaining students identified as Caucasian (32 percent), African American (5 percent), and Asian (1 percent). A substantial percentage (42 percent) of parents also self-reported that the students were English learners with a home language other than English. Slightly more than half (54 percent) of the sample were male. Thirty-seven percent of participants were receiving special education services for a previously identified disability. The two most common disability classifications of participants were speech language impairment (19 percent) and learning disabilities (16 percent). Overall attrition ranged from 12 percent to 15 percent at posttest and from 22 percent to 23 percent at follow-up across outcomes. Rates of attrition were comparable across treatment conditions. At posttest, the difference in attrition rates for SKILL and BAU ranged from 0.1 percent to 1.7 percent across outcomes. At follow-up, differential attrition ranged from 4 percent to 5.7 percent.

Intervention: The manualized SKILL program consists of three phases: Teaching Story Structure and Causal Language, Teaching Strategies for Creating a Situation Model, and Teaching Strategies for integration into Long-Term Memory. Two language intervention techniques, parallel story production and vertical structuring are utilized extensively during all three phases of instruction. In parallel story construction, instructors first model a story, then help children "co-construct" a similar story using scaffolding techniques. In vertical structuring, instructors use scaffolding techniques to help students "connect" short, simple sentences to form complex sentences. The primary purpose of these activities is to teach children to use complex sentences (microstructure) to communicate causal connections between story grammar elements (macrostructure). Each phase ends with a series of literature-based activities designed to help students transfer new skills into authentic contexts they will encounter in school. Each phase contains scaffolded lessons, curricular objectives, materials, and instructions. Lessons progress in each phase resulting in the use of literature-based activities that are closely aligned to the kinds of texts children read and write in general education classrooms.

Research Design and Methods: This project was randomized controlled trial in which at-risk students within classrooms were randomly assigned to receive SKILL or business as usual. In a population sample, the researchers screened 3,380 children using the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and the Test of Narrative Language–2 to assess at-risk status. Those scoring at or below the 33rd percentile on both tests were invited to participate in the study. The researchers assessed outcomes pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 5 months post-intervention.

Control Condition: In the control condition, students received standard classroom practices in place at the school. The researchers conducted 121 classroom observations for 30-minutes each. The amount and type of story instruction provided to students varied across classrooms. The researchers found that 44 percent of observed minutes were devoted to story comprehension and 10 percent of the minutes addressed story writing. Teachers spent no time working with students on oral storytelling. Findings suggest that story production may not be an instructional focus in many primary-grade classrooms.

Key Measures: Narrative outcome measures for this study included the Text of Narrative Language–2 and narrative language samples, which were oral and written self-generated stories produced by the students. Literacy outcome measures included the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test, 4th Edition, the Test of Word Reading Efficiency–2, and the Test of Early Written Language–3. Researchers used the Auditory Working Memory subtest of the Woodcock Johnson III: Test of Cognitive Abilities as a mediator measure.

Data Analytic Strategy: The researchers used multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling to test the efficacy of SKILL on student outcomes, with students at level 1 and classrooms at level 2. The researchers assumed an intent-to-treat model.

Related IES Project: Developing a Narrative Intervention (R324A100063)

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

Project website: A basic summary of the project is available at https://www.meadowscenter.org/projects/detail/supporting-knowledge-in-language-and-literacy-skill

Select Publications:

Capin, P., Gillam, S.L., Fall., A.M., Roberts, G., Dille, J., & Gillam, R.B. (2022). Understanding the nature and severity of reading difficulties among students with language and reading comprehension difficulties. Annals of Dyslexia. 72, 249-275.

Hall, C., Capin, P., Vaughn, S., Gillam, S. L., Wada, R., Fall, A. M., Roberts, G., Dille, J. T., and Gillam, R. B. (2021). Narrative instruction in elementary classrooms: An observation study. Elementary School Journal, 121(3), 454–483.

Gillam, S. L., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Capin, P., Fall, A.-M., Israelsen-Augenstein, M., Holbrook, S., Wada, R., Hancock, A., Fox, C., Dille, J., Magimairaj, B. M., & Gillam, R. B. (2023). Improving oral and written narration and reading comprehension of children at-risk for language and literacy difficulties: Results of a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Educational Psychology, 115(1), 99–117.

Magimairaj, B.M., Capin, P., Gillam, S.L., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Fall, A., and Gillam, R.B. (2022). Online Administration of the Test of Narrative Language--Second Edition: Psychometrics and Considerations for Remote Assessment.Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53(2), 404–416.