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Purpose: The purpose of this early efficacy study (Fey & Finestack, 2009) was to determine whether a new contextualized language intervention (CLI) or an existing decontextualized language intervention (DLI) resulted in greater changes in children's language and narration in comparison to a notreatment condition (CON).
Method: Sixteen children between the ages of 6;0 (years; months) and 9;0 were randomly assigned to the CLI and DLI groups. Eight similar-age children from the no-treatment phase of a separate study acted as a control group. Children in the CLI and DLI conditions received 50-min group intervention sessions 3 times per week for 6 weeks. Sentence-and discourse-level measures were administered to assess intervention outcomes.
Results: Both interventions were associated with statistically significant gains on sentence- and discourse-level measures when compared to a no-treatment condition. Effect size analyses demonstrated that the CLI group outperformed the DLI group on all outcome measures.
Conclusion: The results revealed signs of efficacy in an intervention approach in which clinicians treated multiple linguistic targets using meaningful activities with high levels of topic continuity. With some minor revisions, this intervention should be ready to be tested in a larger, more costly, and more internally valid efficacy study.
Key Words: intervention, school-age, language, narration
School-age children with specific language impairments (SLI) often demonstrate difficulty in comprehending and producing narratives. For example, these children are less accurate at answering literal and inferential questions than their same-age peers (Gillam, Fargo, & Robertson, 2009; Laing & Kamhi, 2002; Trabasso & Magliano, 1996). In addition, their spoken and written narratives may contain fewer words, more ungrammatical utterances, and fewer story grammar elements than those of their same-age peers (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987; Boudreau, 2008; Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Fey, Catts, Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004; Gillam & Johnston, 1998; Greenhalgh & Strong, 2000; McFadden & Gillam, 1996; Wagner, Sahlen, & Nettelbladt, 1999). Unfortunately, it is rare for children with language impairments (LI ) to demonstrate any one of these problems in isolation (Nippold, Hesketh, Duthie, & Mansfield, 2005). Difficulties in one area (e.g., comprehension) often impact performance in another (e.g., literate language use). These deficits negatively impact the ability of children with SLI to profit from instruction in the classroom without some form of intervention (Johnson et al., 1999; Stothard,...