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 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 purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention on kindergarteners’ oral and written narrative and oral expository skills. The participants included 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the upper Midwest. They were randomly assigned at the classroom level to a treatment or control condition. The treatment group received large group (tier-1) oral narrative language instruction led by classroom teachers and followed the Story Champs procedures. Students whose oral narrative retell skills did not improve after one month of large group instruction were placed in small groups and received more intense oral narrative language instruction in addition to Tier 1 instruction. Tier 2 instruction followed the Story Champs small groups producers and was administered by speech-language pathologists. At posttest, students’ narrative retell, personal story generation, narrative writing, and expository retell scores were analyzed. The treatment and control groups were compared across all measures. The Tier 2 treatment group was also compared across all measures to matched samples of at-risk, average, and advanced students in the control group. The results indicate that the treatment group made significant improvements across all measures when compared to the control group. Tier 2 students consistently performed similarly to or significantly outperformed their at-risk, average, and advanced peers across all measures with the exception of expository retell. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a multi-tiered oral narrative language intervention in improving the narrative and expository language skills of kindergarten students. Future research is needed to determine the effects of implementing an explicit expository oral language intervention on kindergarten students’ language skills.