Background: Children in India are among the lowest performing students on international reading comprehension and writing assessments. Oral language instruction may improve these literacy outcomes. Aim: This pilot study investigated whether a multi-tiered system of language support (MTSLS) improved oral narrative language comprehension, reading…

Tender Shoots is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) for parents aimed at improving preschool children's oral language skills relevant for later reading. Parents of 72 preschool children (M = 50 months) were randomly assigned to either a Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition, a Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition, or an…

Purpose: The purpose of this randomized controlled trial was to examine the effects of a multitiered system of language support (MTSLS) on kindergarteners' narrative retelling, personal stories, writing, and expository language. Method: Participants were 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the United States. Twenty-eight…

A large number of research studies have highlighted the relevance of oral narratives for describing children's linguistic constraints, developmental stages of narrative discourse patterns, and sociocultural identities. Yet, little research has been found on the use of oral narratives as a means to longitudinally improve oral discourse coherence…

Oral narrative assessments are important for diagnosis of language disorders in school-age children so scoring needs to be reliable and consistent. This study explored the impact of training on the variability of story grammar scores in children's oral narrative assessments scored by multiple raters. Fifty-one speech pathologists and 19 final-year…

This study examined the effect of the combination of task repetition and post-task transcribing (TRPT) on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 oral performance and their subsequent development. Taiwanese university students (N = 39) were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: TRPT, task repetition (TR), and control group, and…

The purpose of this cluster randomized group study was to investigate the effect of multitiered, dual-language instruction on children's oral language skills, including vocabulary, narrative retell, receptive and expressive language, and listening comprehension. The participants were 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 81) who were learning English and…

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure…

This study examines the relationship between complex oral language and phonological awareness in the preschool years. Specifically, the authors investigate the relationship between concurrent measures of oral narrative structure (based on measures of both story retell and generation), and measures of blending and elision in a sample of 89 children…