Narrative Discourse Intervention for School-Aged Children with Language Impairment Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy

Narrative language proficiency is a critical contributor to academic success for school-aged students. This article presents a narrative language intervention, Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL), that is based on research in the fields of developmental psycholinguistics and discourse processing. SKILL was designed to provide school-age children with language learning difficulties with the cognitive and linguistic skills that underlie narrative comprehension and composition. A comprehensive description of the intervention program is presented first, followed by a summary of the qualitative and quantitative evidence supporting its use. Quantitative results from summarized studies show that SKILL is associated with consistently moderate to large effect sizes for improving narrative proficiency, ranging from 0.66 to 2.54 for students with language learning difficulties aged 5–11 years, and from 1.63 to 5.11 for students with autism spectrum disorders aged 8–12 years. Narrative intervention has the potential to have lasting effects that generalize to new stories and new story comprehension and production contexts (such as reading and writing) if children attain the critical cognitive and linguistic skills that support narration.