Presenters: Camryn Lettich ; Shelby Keeler ; Elizabeth Bessey ; Rylie Dutson
Authors: Camryn Lettich, Shelby Keeler, Elizabeth Bessey, Rylie Dutson, Kristi Jones
Faculty Advisor: Douglas Petersen
Institution: Brigham Young University
The National Center for Education Statistics (2017) reported that only 27% of school-age students write proficiently. Because of this, curriculum standards focus on writing, particularly emphasizing expository discourse (Hall-Mills & Apel, 2015). Writing instruction for all students can be facilitated through a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) which implements tiered interventions based on individual needs. Research also indicates that early intervention is the most effective way to prevent writing difficulty (McMaster et al., 2018). Early MTSS can focus on oral language to improve writing skills because they are significantly related (Dockrell et al., 2009; Spencer, and Petersen, 2018).However, there is no research that has examined the causal relationship between oral narrative language intervention and expository writing. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare the expository text structure and language complexity in the writing of kindergarteners randomly assigned to a multi-tiered oral narrative treatment group or a no-treatment control group for 14 weeks. Participants included 70 kindergarteners with language difficulty and 200 typically developing kindergarteners. Students with language difficulty were assigned to a tier-2 treatment group or a control group. The typically developing participants were randomly assigned to a tier-1 treatment group or a control group. Results indicated that there was a significant difference between groups for language complexity, yet no significant difference between the treatment and control groups for text structure. For the students with language difficulty, there were no significant differences between the treatment and control groups for either outcome. These results indicate that gains in oral language complexity resulting from oral narrative language intervention can transfer to expository writing for typically developing students, but that text structure was not significantly impacted. For children with language difficulty, oral narrative language intervention was not sufficient to improve expository written language complexity or text structure.