The purpose of the current study was to examine the longitudinal effects of a multi-tiered narrative language intervention in at-risk students provided in kindergarten on fourth grade reading comprehension. The participants included 686 students from four school districts in the upper Midwest. Twenty-eight kindergarten classrooms were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition resulting in 14 treatment classrooms and 14 control classrooms. Every student in the study participated in a pretest regarding oral narrative language skills. Students in the control group were considered to be at-risk, average performing, or advanced performing depending on their pretest score. Each student in the treatment group received large group oral narrative language instruction that followed Story Champs procedures and was led by the classroom teachers for 14 weeks. The control group engaged in their regular classroom instruction that was established at the commencement of the school year. Students who were unable to meet the narrative retell criterion at pretest and whose oral narrative retell skills did not improve after one month of large group instruction then received additional small group (Tier 2) oral narrative intervention for 10 weeks. Tier 2 intervention followed Story Champs small group procedures and was administered by speech-language pathologists. Posttest scores reflecting a significant difference in progress between treatment and control groups in narrative skill in kindergarten are given in Mollie Brough's thesis (Brough, 2019). Reading comprehension was then measured five years later via the state standardized assessment. The results indicated that the at-risk treatment group had similar reading comprehension scores to the average performing, advanced performing and combined average and advanced performing control groups. This study provides preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on later reading comprehension skills in at-risk students.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a tier-2 combined oral narrative and expository language intervention on kindergarteners' narrative and expository skills in comparison to an alternate decoding intervention and no treatment control condition. This study included 54 kindergarten students. After being administered the PEARL Kindergarten Screener at the beginning of the school year, eight students were found as at-risk for future reading comprehension difficulty and were matched to nine students not-at-risk, and all assigned to a language treatment group. Additional students not-at-risk for future reading comprehension difficulty were randomly assigned to an alternate decoding treatment group (n = 9) and to a no treatment control group (n = 9). Narrative intervention took place for approximately four months biweekly for 15 minutes, then expository language intervention was provided for approximately two months biweekly for 15 minutes. Students across all conditions were administered narrative and expository measures at the conclusion of the study. Results indicated that the typically developing students had significantly higher narrative and expository outcomes when compared to the typically developing students in the alternate decoding treatment and no treatment condition. Additionally, we found that the at-risk students who received oral language intervention were able to catch up to their typically developing peers in both narrative and expository outcomes with a trajectory that suggested that they would eventually meet grade level narrative language benchmark expectations. Early oral language intervention is the first step in reducing the poor reading comprehension outcomes across the nation. By targeting oral language comprehension, even young kindergarten students can improve both decoding and comprehension, better preparing them for future academic success.

The purpose of this study was to determine if dialogic reading involving diverse kindergarten students would significantly affect narrative language. Various studies have corroborated the effectiveness of dialogic reading instruction on the expressive vocabulary of monolingual children. However, few studies have examined oral narrative language outcomes, especially with diverse students. A total of 142 kindergarten students were randomly assigned to a treatment group or control group. Each child in the treatment group received 14 weeks of whole-class dialogic reading instruction from their kindergarten teacher two times per week for 20 minutes each session in their classroom. The dialogic reading program included explicit target vocabulary instruction based on unfamiliar vocabulary selected from each storybook. The oral narrative language (narrative retells and personal narratives) of each child were assessed using the CUBED Narrative Language Measures subtest (NLM). Results indicated that students in the control group and the treatment group (including culturally and linguistically diverse students) showed no significant difference in their narrative retell scores after the intervention. However, students (including CLD students) in the treatment group demonstrated significant improvement in their personal story generations when compared with the control group after dialogic reading intervention. The current research gives implications for current kindergarten education by indicating that a focus on early dialogic reading can augment oral language skills and therefore academic skills later in elementary school.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the concurrent and predictive validity of the CUBED Narrative Language Measures Listening and Reading subtests to evaluate their psychometric properties as defined by Deno (2003). Method: Evidence of concurrent validity for the NLM Listening and Reading subtests was examined using data from 1,146 preschool through third grade students. The NLM subtests were compared to similar subtests from other assessments administered at approximately the same time. Evidence of predictive validity was examined using data from these same NLM subtests from 1,512 kindergarten through third grade students, including 71 third grade students for the examination of sensitivity and specificity. This was accomplished by examining how the students' NLM assessment scores related to their future performance on tests measuring similar constructs. Sensitivity and specificity were determined by examining how the well the NLM subtests identified students performing at or below grade level according to state proficiency tests. Measures used to determine concurrent and predictive validity included the following: curriculum-based assessment for writing, narrative language sample, expository language, Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals 2 (CELF-P 2), Renfrew Bus Story, Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), and Wyoming Proficiency subtests for Wyoming Students (PAWS). Results: Results indicate that the NLM Listening and NLM Reading had moderate to strong correlations with all criterion measures for concurrent validity. Results also indicated the NLM Listening and NLM reading, separately and combined, accounted for meaningful variance in criterion measures used for predictive validity. Combined, the NLM Listening and Reading had fair to excellent sensitivity and specificity for criterion measures, with 77% sensitivity and 100% specificity for end-of-year state reading assessment performance. This study provides evidence that the NLM Listening and Reading can accurately measure and predict oral language and reading outcomes in students preschool through third grade, indicating it as a useful curriculum-measure as defined by Deno (2003). Future research should examine the extent to which the entire CUBED assessment, including the decoding and dynamic assessment subtests, have concurrent and predictive evidence of validity.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on kindergarten students' written expository discourse. The participants included 270 participants from a larger sample of 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the upper Midwest geographical region of the United States. Participants received contextualized language intervention using Story Champs narrative intervention procedures. Tier-1 treatment groups received large group instruction from their classroom teacher who followed Story Champs procedures. Students whose oral narrative retell scores did not improve following the initial four weeks of treatment were assigned to receive additional small group intervention (Tier-2). Tier-2 intervention also followed Story Champs procedures but was led by the schools' speech-language pathologists rather than classroom teachers. Expository writing samples were collected before and after intervention and following the treatment period. These writing samples were analyzed for expository language complexity and text structure. Pretest and posttest writing samples were evaluated on measures of expository language complexity and text structure using the Expository Language Measures (ELM) flow chart. Typical language learning students in the Tier-1 treatment condition were compared with typical language learning students in the control condition and showed statistically greater performance on measures of written expository language complexity, but not on measures of written expository text structure. Additionally, students with weaker language learning ability in the Tier-2 treatment group were compared to students with similar language learning difficulty in the control group. Analyses revealed no significant differences on measures of written expository language complexity nor written expository text structure for these students with weaker language learning ability. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-tiered oral narrative intervention in improving written expository language complexity for typical language learning kindergarten students. Furthermore, this study indicates the need for further investigations of interventions specifically aimed at addressing expository discourse in younger students.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

The aim of this study is to investigate the opportunities for oral language development that teachers offer pupils during lessons in Swedish in grade 3. The following questions guided the study: how do teachers perceive that they offer the pupils opportunities for oral language development in their teaching and what possibilities for oral language development do teachers offer pupils? The methods used to answer the questions are interview and observation of two teachers in two different classrooms. In all, two interviews and four observations were conducted. An observation schedule was used during the observations and the interviews were semi-structured, based on the same questions. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The collected material showed that the oral activities which the teachers said they offered their pupils were working in pairs or small groups, whole-class conversations and drama. The teachers said that they interacted with the pupils through taking turns and asking questions. The activities the teachers offered their pupils during the four observations were whole-class conversations led by the teacher, structured conversations in small groups and spontaneous conversations among pupils and between pupils and teacher, and interactive book reading. The interactions used by the teachers took the form of speech, questions and body language. The conclusion of the study is that teachers must have more tools for taking advantage of opportunities to let the pupils develop their oral language. The view of what oral language development can involve should also be broadened.

Nous nous sommes interrogée sur l’influence des pratiques langagières de l’enseignant sur l’appropriation de la langue orale chez des élèves entre quatre et cinq ans dans le cadre de narrations. L’objectif de notre travail est double : caractériser les interactions dans le cadre d’un échange duel maître-élève; constater, dans une visée acquisitionnelle, ce qui, de la part de l’enseignant, en termes d’offres langagières du point de vue interactionnel et syntaxique, favorise l’acquisition de la langue orale chez l’élève. Nous appuyant sur les travaux socio-interactionnistes (Vygotski, 1934, Bruner, 1983, 1991) et en acquisition du langage (Lentin, 1998, Canut, 2006), nos hypothèses sont les suivantes : une offre langagière adaptée de la part de l’enseignant -reposant sur une reformulation des énoncés de l’enfant et un langage syntaxiquement structuré qui s’inscrivent dans la zone proximale de développement de l’élève- est déterminante dans son évolution langagière. Dans le cadre de l’analyse de données qualitative, nous avons analysé à la fois de manière longitudinale et contrastive les interactions langagières entre une enseignante et trois élèves sur une année de moyenne section de maternelle. Nous avons comparé nos premiers résultats avec ceux d’une analyse identique d’interactions langagières d’un enseignant-chercheur avec deux élèves. La méthode d’analyse adoptée a consisté à la fois en une analyse des interactions en unités interactionnelles et en celle des énoncés (maître et élève) en catégories syntaxiques. A travers les deux expérimentations analysées dans une perspective comparative, nos hypothèses ont été vérifiées. / We have questioned the effect of the teacher's use of language upon the speech growth of pupils aged four and five through narration. Our research has two objectives : characterizing the linguistic interactions within the context of a one-to-one teacher-pupil exchange; making an observation of what, in the teacher's communication, in terms of interactions and syntax, foster the pupil's acquisition of oral skills. Relying on socio-interactionists (Vigotski, 1934, Bruner, 1983,1991) and language acquisition theories (Lentin, 1988, Canut, 2006), we made the following assumptions : an appropriate teacher's response, based upon rephrasing the child's utterances and a syntaxically structured model fitting in their zone of proximal development, is a determining factor in the evolution of their verbalness. In the framework of the analysis of qualitative data , we have analysed at the same time a longitudinal way and a contrastive way, the language ! interactions between a female teacher and three pupils in a nursey school class during one school year. Then we have compared our initial results with the ones of an identical analysis of language interactions between a researcher and two pupils. The methodology consisted of both an analysis of the interactions in interaction units and an analysis of the utterances (teacher and pupil ) in syntactic categories. Through the two experimentations analysed from a comparative viewpoint, our hypotheses have been confirmed.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a problemática da fala do aluno em aula de Inglês como Língua Estrangeira, por meio das opiniões de alunos e professores. O principal aspecto analisado foi o processo motivacional dos alunos para falar inglês em aula. As respostas foram divididas em oito categorias: o professor, as atividades, os outros alunos, o material didático, a própria personalidade do aluno, a avaliação, o ambiente de aula, a falta de conhecimento da língua estrangeira e outros fatores. No entanto, as razões por que o aluno estuda inglês, as opiniões sobre a distribuição da fala em aula entre alunos e professores e as possibilidades de intervenções que estes utilizam de maneira consciente para estimular os alunos a falar em inglês durante a aula também foram analisadas. Para tanto, foram desenvolvidos e aplicados questionários em 125 alunos, jovens e adultos, que estudavam em Cursos Livres em um Centro de Idiomas da cidade de São Paulo. Ao mesmo tempo, 4 professores da mesma instituição também responderam questionários similares, desenvolvidos de maneira específica para esta pesquisa. Os resultados principais foram a grande diversidade de possibilidades para o processo motivacional do aluno e a importância atribuída ao professor como um estímulo para eles falarem em aula. Conseqüentemente, é necessário que o professor conheça seus alunos (interesses, objetivos, gostos, experiências) por meio de uma comunicação significativa em sala de aula, de modo a compreender o seu processo motivacional. Além de conhecer os alunos, os professores de Inglês devem utilizar estratégias específicas com o objetivo de incentivá-los a falar em aula. A maioria dos professores estudados afirmou utilizar o estímulo direto por meio de questões e debates e a conscientização do aluno sobre o processo de ensino-aprendizagem como estratégias de estímulo à fala. Quanto aos obstáculos para falar em aula, a personalidade do aluno foi o fator mais citado, devido à timidez e ao medo de errar. Além disso, todos concordaram com a idéia de que os alunos devem falar uma quantidade de tempo ligeiramente superior à dos professores durante a aula. Por fim, foi observada na população pesquisada uma clara predominância da motivação instrumental. / This dissertation analyses the students speech in English as a Foreign Language classes, according to the opinions of students and teachers. The main analyzed aspect was the students motivational process to speak English during the class. The answers were divided in eight categories: the teacher, the class activities, the other students, the course material, the students own personality, the assessment, the class environment, the lack of knowledge about the foreign language and other factors. However, the English students learning goals, the opinions about class speech distribution among teachers and students and the strategies intentionally used by teachers to encourage their pupils to speak English during the class were also studied. For that, self-report questionnaires were developed and applied to 125 young adult and adult students in eligible EFL programs in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Also, 4 teachers from the same institution answered similar questionnaires, specifically developed for this study. The main results were the huge diversity in the students motivational process and the importance attributed to the teacher as an encouragement for them to speak during the class. Consequently, it is necessary for teachers to know their students (interests, goals, likes and dislikes, experiences) through meaningful interaction in the classroom in order to understand their motivational process. Besides knowing their students, the teachers used specific strategies to encourage them to speak during the class. Most teachers surveyed said they used direct stimulation through questions and class discussions and tried to make students aware of their learning process as strategies for speech encouragement. The students shyness and fear of making mistakes were regarded as the most frequent obstacles to speak during the EFL class. Besides that, everybody agreed that the students should speak a little more than the teachers in the class. Finally, the instrumental motivation was predominant among the studied population.

Cette recherche a pour objet l'enseignement de l'oral en langue française au Liban, dans deux secteurs éducatifs différents (public et privé), et dans une société plurilingue où les différences sociales, les pratiques langagières et religieuses ne sont pas uniformes. Quels sont les paramètres qui déterminent l 'enseignement / apprentissage de l'oral et ses variations au Liban ? Pour répondre à cette problématique, nous avons construit un corpus complexe constitué de 6 séances d'oral observées dans deux écoles libanaises (publique et privée) soit primaire et collège en France. De plus, nous avons effectué des entretiens semi-directifs avec des enseignantes, des apprenants ainsi qu'avec les directeurs des deux établissements scolaires. Nous avons de même invité les apprenants à remplir des fiches langagières pour faire apparaitre leur religion, leur origine, leur niveau social et culturel ainsi que leur histoire et leurs représentations des langues. Nous avons traduit et transcrit, puis analysé les données recueillies, en mobilisant des outils d'investigation pluriels, fédérés par l'engagement dans une démarche sociolinguistique et didactique de l'oral. Il s'agira de démontrer que multiples sont les facteurs qui influent sur l'enseignement/ apprentissage de l'oral en français au Liban et qu'ils varient d'un contexte à un autre. Notre recherche débouche sur des propositions de formation pour les enseignants libanais, pour qui l'enseignement de l'oral est encore un domaine très nouveau. / This research investigates the teaching of the oral French language in Lebanon, in public and private educational sectors, as well as in the multilingual society where social classes, Ianguage and religious practices are diverse. The thesis problem is the following: What are the parameters that determine the teaching / leaming of the oral language in Lebanon? In order to answer this question,à study composed of 6 oral teaching sessions was done in public and private primary schools in Lebanon. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, students and school directors; students were also asked to fill out language-cards to determine their religion, origin,social class and cultural levels, as well as their thought about languages. The researcher translated,transcribed and analyzed the data collected using various investigative tools. It demonstrated that many factors influence the teaching / learning of the oral French Ianguage in Lebanon .. In conclusion, the researcher suggested various training for the Lebanese teachers.