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The Narrative Language Performance of Three Types of At-Risk First-Grade

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 LSHSS
Article
The Narrative Language Performance
of Three Types of At-Risk
First-Grade Readers
Melissa M. Allen, a Teresa A. Ukrainetz, a and Alisa L. Carswell b
Purpose: This study investigated the narrative language per-
formance of 3 types of readers who had been identified as being
at risk through code-based response-to-intervention (RTI)
procedures.
Method: In a retrospective group comparison, 32 at-risk
1st-grade readers were identified: children who resolved with-
out intervention (early resolvers, n = 11), children who met
criterion following 4 weeks of intervention (good responders,
n = 8), and children who failed to meet criterion following
4 weeks of intervention (poor responders, n = 13). A narrative
retell and a norm-referenced language test were obtained
before intervention.
Results: There were no significant differences between the
3 learner types on the language test. However, the narratives
of the good responders were significantly higher than the nar-
ratives of the other 2 groups on total number of words, number
he identification of children who are at risk for aca-
T demic difficulties is changing with the emergence of
response to intervention (RTI). The current focus of
RTI is to identify and ameliorate children’s decoding and
reading fluency difficulties before referral to special educa-
tion. These aspects of reading involve phonological process-
ing and other aspects of language (Cunningham & Stanovich,
1998). However, much of language is not examined in the
current decoding- and fluency-focused RTI models. As a
result, the language needs of this new population of RTI-
identified at-risk readers may be overlooked, particularly
subgroups that may appear to have resolved their initial
a nation’s children, which is accomplished through multiple
University of Wyoming, Laramie
b
STRIDE Learning Center, Cheyenne, WY
Correspondence to Melissa M. Allen: mallen20@uwyo.edu
Editor: Janna Oetting
Associate Editor: Phyllis Schneider
Received April 21, 2011
Accepted September 28, 2011
DOI: 10.1044/0161-1461(2011/11-0024)
LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012 * American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
of different words, and number of communication units. The
narratives of early resolvers and good responders differed sig-
nificantly on the productivity index, number of coordinating
conjunctions, and number of episodic elements. There were no
other significant differences.
Conclusion: Types of learners distinguished by a code-based
RTI model showed differences in their narrative language. First
graders who responded well to code-based reading interven-
tion retold stories that contained more language and better story
grammar than first graders who did not respond well to inter-
vention. These results indicate the need to evaluate narrative
language performance within RTI, especially for early resolvers.
Key Words: response to intervention, reading, narratives,
language
difficulties. This study examined the narrative language per-
formance of three types of learners who had been identified
as being at risk for reading through RTI procedures in first
grade.
RTI Procedures
The 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabil-
ities Education Act (IDEIA; PL 108-446) specifically per-
mitted local education agencies to use an RTI process to
determine whether a child has a specific learning disability.
Alternative reading evaluations that focus on the learning
process are used within the RTI framework. RTI is intended
to significantly improve the reading performance of the
avenues: identifying early reading difficulties, resetting the
learning trajectories of children with mild deficits, determin-
ing which children have inherent significant reading dis-
abilities, and reducing the number of children who need
special education. Research evidence suggests that RTI mod-
els can accomplish all of these purposes (Denton & Mathes,
2003; Gersten et al., 2008). However, the application of
205
RTI in the schools is still in the early stages, with many
variations in administration and implementation challenges
(Fuchs, 2003; Marston, 2005; Mellard, McKnight, & Woods,
2009; Ukrainetz, 2006a).
Children who are struggling with reading are identified
early in their schooling as having a trajectory that will not
allow them to meet year-end benchmarks. In the RTI process,
educators intervene by teaching particular aspects of reading
and continuously monitoring a child’s response to this in-
struction (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton,
2004; Fuchs, 2003). Although instruction can be individual-
ized and optimized based on learner response, akin to lan-
guage treatment, it is more typically delivered for set periods
of time in a standardized manner with high instructional
fidelity (Troia, 2005). The multitier RTI process begins by
evaluating the performance of all children within a grade
level. In Tier I, at-risk readers initially receive classroom
instruction with regular evaluation. Progress for some of the
children accelerates so they meet benchmarks by the next
evaluation. These children are considered to have been solely
experientially deficient and continue with only regular class-
room instruction. The children still not meeting expecta-
tions then receive supplementary instruction in Tier II. This
instruction may be provided as differentiated small-group
instruction with more intense monitoring. Children not re-
sponding sufficiently to the second tier of instruction may
be provided with the even more intense Tier III intervention.
Children who do not respond satisfactorily to intensive
supplementary support are considered for identification as
reading disabled and eligibility for long-term special edu-
cational support (Swanson & Howard, 2005).
Valid decisions about learning responses in RTI can only
be made if quality instruction has been provided. Quality
instruction involves research-validated curriculum and
practices. Tier I instruction addresses all five “pillars” of
instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary,
comprehension, and fluency (National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development [NICHD] National Read-
ing Panel, 2000). Tier II (and III) intervention is primarily
code based. In kindergarten, instruction focuses on letter-
sound correspondence, phonemic awareness, and basic word
decoding skills. In first and second grade, more advanced
word decoding skills and rapid, accurate oral reading are
addressed. This selective instructional focus is needed to
provide the intensity and therapeutic attention needed for
at-risk readers (Ukrainetz, 2006a). However, it may also
result in overlooking children who may be at risk for other
important reading skills, for example, comprehension.
Reading and Language in a Code-Based
RTI Model
To read fluently and understand what is read, one must
have competency in two broad domains: decoding and
comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Perfetti, 1985).
206 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
Decoding skills and reading comprehension come together in
fluent, skilled reading. However, there are important differ-
ences between the two domains.
Decoding means “breaking the code” and deals with rec-
ognizing the printed word. It involves the print-specific skills
of alphabet knowledge, letter-sound correspondence, and
spelling conventions. Decoding requires a degree of lan-
guage facility. Reading a printed word involves the language
processes of holding phonological representations in mem-
ory, separating and manipulating phonemes, and retrieving
the meaning attached to a phonological representation (Adams,
1990). Deciding how to read a single printed word taps the
linguistic skills of vocabulary, syntax, and discourse (e.g.,
deciding whether to read the word read as /rid/ or /rEd/).
Reading comprehension involves putting the recognized
words together to gain sentential and textual understand-
ing. Reading comprehension has cognitive, attentional, and
situational processes involved, but it is essentially language
(Kamhi, 2009). Language is a huge domain that is diffi-
cult to delimit; most educational learning involves written
or spoken language (American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association [ASHA], 2001; Ukrainetz & Fresquez, 2003).
Language-in-print differs in some significant ways from
spoken language, such as in patterns of syntactic complexity
and decontextualization (Scott, 1995; Westby, 1985), but
essentially language is still language: a complex, dynamic,
multidimensional, rule-governed, conventional representa-
tional system that crosses representational modalities.
The two aspects of reading, decoding and comprehension,
differ in their length and nature of acquisition. Decoding and
fluency are constrained skills in that they are learned fairly
quickly and thoroughly (Paris, 2005). Early code-related
skills are relatively easy to teach, and children can show large
gains in letter names, letter sounds, and phonemic awareness.
By third grade, typical achievers have generally acquired
fluent decoding skills.
In contrast, the language skills and world knowledge that
comprise reading comprehension begin in infancy with con-
versational interactions, grow in the school years with oral
and print experiences, and, depending on life experiences
and learner inclinations, continue to improve through life.
These skills are called unconstrained because of the lack of
a specified mastery criterion: More is usually better (Paris,
2005). In addition to a much longer learning trajectory, lan-
guage is different from decoding in its modifiability. Specific
vocabulary may be acquired easily through lived experi-
ence (e.g., acquiring a dog leads to an array of canine-related
vocabulary). However, the rest of language is more resis-
tant to change, particularly through school lessons (see
Weaver, 1996, for the many fruitless efforts over decades to
improve students’ written grammar).
Based on the differences between decoding and com-
prehension, RTI models concentrated on one domain may
not predict performance on the other domain, thus missing
important information from half of the reading equation. The
only study located that examined this is Al Otaiba and Fuchs
(2006). Al Otaiba and Fuchs examined children’s respon-
siveness to code-based instruction and investigated the learner
characteristics associated with responsiveness. Measures of
fluency, letter sounds, and phoneme segmentation in kinder-
garten and of oral reading in first grade were used to iden-
tify responsiveness by considering growth from pretreatment
to posttreatment. Children were identified as always respon-
sive, meeting the end-of-year criterion for kindergarten
and first grade; never responsive, never meeting the end-of-
year criterion for kindergarten or first grade; or sometimes
responsive, meeting the end-of-year criterion for kinder-
garten or first grade, but not both. Receptive vocabulary
and sentence imitation, along with problem behavior, naming
speed, and amount of intervention, predicted reading fluency
responsiveness after 2 years of intervention. The extended
period of intervention time within the Al Otaiba and Fuchs
study differed from the RTI goal of short-term identification
and amelioration; however, it suggests that language may
be predictive of reading performance within an RTI model.
An important consideration is that the language measures
and scoring systems used in the study provided a very limited
view of language performance.
Reading competence involves both a set of decoding
skills and the large domain of comprehension. Because of
the differing natures of these two domains, code-based RTI
models may be missing the linguistic side of reading.
Language and Reading
Young or poor readers may try to bypass decoding diffi-
culties by tapping into the linguistic side of reading through
the spoken modality. There are strong positive relations
between oral language and both decoding and reading com-
prehension (Bishop & Adams, 1990; Catts, Fey, Tomblin, &
Zhang, 1999, 2002; Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001;
Nation, Clarke, Marshall, & Durand, 2004; Roth, Speece, &
Cooper, 2002; Snowling, 2005): Vocabulary has been con-
sistently implicated in reading performance (NICHD National
Reading Panel, 2000); isolated measures of syntax have been
found to predict reading difficulties (Badian, McAnulty,
Duffy, & Als, 1990; Catts et al., 2001; Vellutino et al., 1996);
and a measure of grammatical complexity obtained during
conversational samples was found to contribute unique vari-
ance to later reading skills (Scarborough, 1990). In addition,
children with and without reading difficulties have been
differentiated on narrative episodic structure (e.g., Feagans
& Short, 1984; Ripich & Griffith, 1988; Roth & Spekman,
1986).
Children’s language skills can be measured in many
ways. Norm-referenced tests typically take a discrete skill
approach that elicits components of language in isolation
and combines the results into global age-referenced scores,
thus evaluating children’s general language skills. Norm-
referenced tests involve strictly standardized procedures that
allow quick and reliable administration and scoring. Global
norm-referenced tests often provide separate receptive and
expressive scores, but expressive skills are usually limited
to single word and sentence responses.
An alternative approach to measuring children’s language
skills is to use discourse tasks that evaluate these compo-
nents in integrated, functional wholes. Narratives are an
important genre of discourse that can tap multiple features
and levels of language simultaneously (Hoffman, 2009a;
Ukrainetz, 2006b). A variety of narrative analyses have dif-
ferentiated children with typically developing (TD) language
from those with language impairment (LI) (e.g., Fey, Catts,
Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004; Gillam &
Johnston, 1992; Liles, 1985; Newman & McGregor, 2006;
Scott & Windsor, 2000). Narrative performance is typically
evaluated through language sampling procedures that may
be standardized and may even have age comparison infor-
mation (e.g., Miller & Chapman, 2004; Strong, 1998), but
the open-ended responses and the detailed descriptive results
are not typically amenable to the strict psychometric proce-
dures of norm-referenced testing. An exception to this is
the Test of Narrative Language (TNL; Gillam & Pearson,
2004), which samples whole narratives, but performance is
still reduced to overall receptive and expressive scores.
One type of narrative task, a retell of a previously pre-
sented story, has both comprehension and production demands.
The model narrative presents the events, plot structure, and
words that the narrator is to retell, which allows more reliable
scoring than a generated story that can go in many directions.
Retelling requires language, attention, comprehension, and
memory for the original story. Despite the support of the
source story, as narrators retell the story, they filter the
events through their own linguistic and cognitive resources
(Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Slobin & Welsh, 1973). Thus,
narrative retells may be a particularly revealing elicitation
task for investigating relations between children’s reading
and their oral language.
Microstructure analysis. Narrative retells can be evalu-
ated at microstructural and macrostructural levels. Micro-
structure is the sentence-internal structure of a narrative
(Justice et al., 2006). It involves measures of vocabulary
(e.g., quantity and variety of words), morphological structure
(e.g., inflections and derivations), and syntax (e.g., con-
junctions, noun phrases, and dependent clauses). Micro-
structural measures that have differentiated children with
language difficulties from children with TD language include
total number of words (TNW), number of different words
(NDW), number of utterances, mean length of utterance
(MLU), and grammatical accuracy (e.g., Fey et al., 2004;
Newman & McGregor, 2006; Scott & Windsor, 2000).
These individual measures have shown some utility in de-
scribing language and distinguishing groups; nonetheless,
grouping outcomes from two or more measures may produce
more robust group differentiation (e.g., Puranik, Lombardino,
& Altmann, 2008). A common grouping is by the language
Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 207
domains of semantics and syntax, though some frequently
used measures draw on both domains. MLU, for example, will
be affected by both the size of the child’s vocabulary and
his or her phrasal structure available to construct utterances.
There may be ways of combining these measures that are
more revealing of patterns of language use, such as that of
Justice et al. (2006).
Justice et al. (2006) empirically investigated how a com-
prehensive array of microstructural measures could be
parsimoniously combined in a few summative indices to
provide a comprehensive and convenient measure of micro-
structure for children’s oral narratives. During the norming
process for the TNL, narratives were obtained from 250 chil-
dren ages 5 to 12 years (Gillam & Pearson, 2004). The oral
narratives were generated based on a single fanciful pic-
ture. Scores on eight measures were calculated: TNW, NDW,
number of T-units, mean length of T-units in words, num-
ber of complex T-units, number of coordinating conjunctions
(COORD), number of subordinating conjunctions (SUBORD),
and proportion of complex T-units. The scores were then
subjected to an exploratory factor analysis that revealed two
major factors: linguistic productivity and complexity. These
two summative indices were together termed the index of
narrative microstructure (INMIS). The formulae and indices
reported at 1-year intervals were not applied to another
independent sample, but the INMIS appears to have potential
as an efficient and clinically useful summative measure of
narrative microstructure.
Hoffman (2009b) tested whether the INMIS or an error
measure better differentiated children with and without LI.
Twenty-four children between the ages of 8 and 10 years
with LI were matched for age, gender, and nonverbal cogni-
tive ability with 24 children with typical language. The
children narrated a wordless picture book. The narratives
were analyzed for INMIS productivity, INMIS complexity,
and the proportion of utterances with syntactic or semantic
errors. The results indicated that there were no significant
differences between the two groups for productivity, but
there were significant differences for complexity and errors.
The effect size for the error measure was much larger than that
for complexity, indicating the importance of evaluating
grammatical accuracy. The lack of sensitivity of INMIS
productivity did not correspond with the consistent finding
that children with LI produce less language than their TD
peers (e.g., Fey et al., 2004; Newman & McGregor, 2006;
Scott & Windsor, 2000). However, the elicitation technique
of narrating a set number of pages may have provided
support for weaker narrators, reducing variation and group
differences in story length.
Macrostructure analysis. In addition to sentence-internal
microstructural analyses, narratives can be analyzed for how
sentences are organized and linked into a discourse unit.
These are macrostructural analyses. A common macro-
structural analysis is story grammar. Story grammar analysis
examines how agents resolve complications through a series
208 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
of causally related elements (Mandler & Johnson, 1977;
Stein & Glenn, 1979). These story elements (i.e., setting, ini-
tiating event or complication, internal response, plan, attempt,
consequence, and reaction) are organized into problem-
solution units called episodes. A complete episode is a three-
part structure that consists of a complication, an attempt to
resolve the complication, and a consequence (Peterson &
McCabe, 1983).
Story grammar studies have shown mixed findings con-
cerning children with LI. In story generation and retell tasks,
Merritt and Liles (1987) found that the number of com-
plete episodes and number of story grammar elements differ-
entiated 9- to 11-year-old children with and without LI. Other
studies have failed to find reliable story grammar differ-
ences (Liles, Duffy, Merritt, & Purcell, 1995; Newman &
McGregor, 2006). Differences may be due to the sensitiv-
ity of the measure of episodic structure. For example, the
number of complete episodes may not be as sensitive as
measuring the presence or frequency of later occurring com-
ponents, such as motivating states or plans.
Language skills can be evaluated through norm-referenced
tests or narrative sample analyses. Narrative sample analyses
may be a more sensitive measure of subtle differences in
performance due to the natural context, which does not con-
strain linguistic productions. Narrative analyses provide
information on microstructural features that reflect linguistic
productivity and complexity and on macrostructural organi-
zational features, such as story grammar. Evidence has been
found that both types of features distinguish children with
LI from their TD peers.
The Current Study
This study investigated the narrative language perfor-
mance of first graders who had been identified as being at
risk for reading difficulties through an RTI process. The
RTI model of reading instruction and assessment is intended
to redirect experientially based learning trajectories and
identify children with persistent learning problems. RTI
instruction in first grade is primarily code based, with little
attention to comprehension. Many young children who are
identified with code-based difficulties will also present with
language difficulties that are manifested concurrently or later
in oral language and reading comprehension (Bishop &
Adams, 1990; Catts et al., 2002; Nation et al., 2004). The
primary purpose of this study was to determine whether
narrative language performance differentiates learner types
who have been identified through code-based RTI procedures.
In this study, first graders were identified as being at
risk for reading difficulties in January. The children’s oral
reading fluency was reassessed in March, at which point the
early resolvers were identified. Early resolvers were children
who had shown poor performance at entry to first grade
but who resolved their difficulties before intervention. These
children were considered typical learners who got off to a
poor start, possibly from poor test-taking behavior or mini-
mal experiential deficits. In April, the narrative language
performance and general language skills of all children
participating in the study were assessed before code-based
Tier II intervention was initiated, which also occurred in
April. Once the intervention was completed, good respond-
ers and poor responders were identified.
Good responders and poor responders, who had more
persistent deficits than early resolvers, responded differently
to Tier II intervention. Good responders accelerated their
growth trajectories and met criterion growth expectations.
These children were considered experientially deficient but
good learners who were not expected to require further sup-
plementary reading instruction. Poor responders consisted
of the children who failed to meet criterion growth expecta-
tions following intervention. These children were expected
to have continued reading deficits and possibly inherent
learning disabilities.
There were several possible outcomes for this study, de-
pending on the relationship between decoding and compre-
hension, the latter being essentially language. If decoding
and language are parallel in the early grades, so a child who
is low in decoding will be low in language, then children
identified by code-based RTI processes should also have low
language. As such, poor responders would show the weakest
narrative language performance; early resolvers, who do
not require supplemental decoding attention, would show the
highest narrative language performance; and good respon-
ders would fall between these two groups with their initial
deficits but a good capacity for learning given supplementary
instruction.
However, if decoding and language travel different paths,
then any of the three groups may demonstrate language def-
icits regardless of their performance in decoding and read-
ing fluency (Bishop, McDonald, Bird, & Hayiou-Thomas,
2009). If so, additional identification practices need to be
instituted along with code-based RTI. The outcome of this
study matters most for early resolvers. If these children are
discovered to have low narrative language performance, then
they are at particular peril because early resolvers are con-
sidered capable learners who, despite an initial misstep, do
not need any attention beyond regular classroom instruction.
We employed two measures of language in our study:
a norm-referenced test to measure children’s general lan-
guage skills and a narrative retell to investigate their narra-
tive language performance. The norm-referenced expressive
score was only minimally expressive, with no tasks required
beyond single sentence production. Narrative language
performance was measured in terms of eight microstructural
measures, INMIS productivity and complexity indices, and
two measures of episodic structure for a narrative retell. Use of
this general language test allowed determination of whether
a narrative retell taps language skills other than those obtained
with conventional norm-referenced measures. It was ex-
pected that the narrative retell would be more sensitive than
the norm-referenced test to potentially subtle differences in
linguistic competence of the three learner types.
The purpose of this study was to examine the narrative
language performance of first graders who had been iden-
tified as being at risk for reading difficulties. The specific
research questions were:
& Do these three learner groups differ on their total,
receptive, or expressive language as measured by a
norm-referenced test of oral language?
& Do these three learner groups differ on individual
measures of microstructure obtained during a narrative
retell?
& Do these three learner groups differ on indices of
productivity and complexity obtained during a narrative
retell?
& Do these three learner groups differ on macrostructural
measures of episodic complexity obtained during a
narrative retell?
METHOD
Design
A retrospective group comparison design was employed.
The data were obtained in 2001–2002 as part of a larger
project (Allen, Nippold, & Simmons, 2011), with the current
narrative analyses designed and applied following data col-
lection. All first graders in the district had been assessed
on reading at the beginning of the school year in September.
Study participation was solicited for children who were iden-
tified as being below expectations in January of first grade and
reading was reassessed in March. Participants were admin-
istered an assessment battery in April and then underwent
4 weeks of reading intervention and progress monitoring. Only
the measures relevant to the current study are reported here.
Participants
The participants were selected from a suburban school
district encompassing six elementary schools in the Pacific
Northwest. Five of the elementary schools qualified for
Title I services. In this school district, 43% of the children
qualified for free and reduced-price meals. The majority of
the children were White (87.2%); of the remaining children,
6.8% were Latino, 2.2% were Asian, 2.1% were African
American, and 1.7% was Native American.
School district personnel completed early literacy bench-
mark testing for every child in the district three times across
the academic year using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic
Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 1996)
and the Test of Reading Fluency (TORF; Deno, Deno, Marston,
& Marston, 1987). District personnel assessed an original
pool of 398 children in kindergarten, who were then followed
Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 209
into first grade. During January of their first-grade year,
these children were assessed on reading fluency using the
TORF.
Across the school district, 42 children (10.6%) read
<20 correct words per minute (CWPM) on the TORF in
January of their first-grade year. They were not on target to
reach the end-of-year first-grade benchmark and were iden-
tified as being at risk for reading difficulties. Their par-
ticipation was sought for a set of investigations, including
the current one. Thirty-four children returned consent forms
and received an assessment battery. Two children did not
complete the testing, resulting in a total of 32 children iden-
tified as the participants who read <20 CWPM in January
of first grade (M = 12.50, SD = 7.01). At the time of data
collection, none of the children was receiving special educa-
tion services for reading or instruction in English as a second
language; three participants were receiving services for
speech.
Following testing in January, the 32 children continued to
receive regular reading instruction without any supplemen-
tary assistance (i.e., intervention). In March, these children
were retested with the TORF. The children who met the
target performance of 30 CWPM were considered to be
performing at a level equivalent to their nonidentified peers.
These 11 children were identified as early resolvers and
did not receive supplementary reading intervention. The
21 children who read <30 CWPM received supplementary
reading intervention for 4 weeks.
Oral reading fluency was assessed once a week using
the TORF over the 4 weeks of intervention. Deno, Fuchs,
Marston, and Shin (2001) identified an appropriate increase
in words read correctly per minute for TD first graders as
1.8 words per week (7.2 WPM increase over 4 weeks). Eight
participants met this standard and were identified as good
responders. Thirteen participants exhibited a TORF increase
score of <7.2 WPM growth and were identified as poor
responders. The three learner groups were similar for age,
gender, and ethnicity (Table 1).
Table 1. Age, gender, and ethnicity of the study participants.
The pattern of performance on reading fluency at the
three testing points supported the learner group assignments
(Table 2): Early resolvers consistently outperformed good
responders and poor responders, and by the end of the inter-
vention, good responders outperformed poor responders.
These results confirm that the three identified groups repre-
sented different types of at-risk readers.
Measures
Oral reading fluency. The TORF is an individually ad-
ministered criterion-referenced reading measure of accuracy
and rate that consists of equivalent grade-level passages. The
child is shown a passage but is not told or shown any pictures
about it. The child is instructed to read aloud each word. If
a child hesitates or struggles with a word for 3 s, then the tester
provides the target. Errors include substitutions, omissions,
and hesitations longer than 3 s. The child is required to stop
reading after 1 min. The total score is the number of CWPM.
Children read different passages at each testing point.
Oral language. The Test of Language Development—
Primary (TOLD–P:3; Newcomer & Hammill, 1997) was
administered following standardized instructions. Six sub-
tests examine semantic and syntactic production and com-
prehension: Picture Vocabulary, Oral Vocabulary, Relational
Vocabulary, Grammatical Understanding, Sentence Imita-
tion, and Grammatical Completion. The Spoken Language
(r = .96, content sampling average; r = .92, time sampling),
Listening (r = .91, content sampling average; r = .88, time
sampling), and Speaking (r = .92, content sampling average;
r = .82, time sampling) composite standard scores were
obtained to represent the children’s total, receptive, and
expressive language.
Narrative. A narrative language sample was elicited using
the Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure (SNAP; Strong,
1998). In this procedure, a child is presented with a book
and is told to look at the book while he or she listens to the
Table 2. Mean and standard deviation for reading fluency
(correct words per minute on the Test of Reading Fluency
[TORF; Deno, Deno, Marston, & Marston, 1987]) by time
and group.

Early Good Poor

resolvers responders responders Early Good Poor
Characteristic (n = 11) (n = 8) (n = 13) resolvers responders responders
M SD M SD M SD
Age
In months 84.2 85.8 84.7
In years;months 4;9 4;7 5;2 Januarya,b 19.00 6.57 12.25 2.43 7.15 4.20
Gender Pretesta,b 45.18 10.48 14.75 5.47 13.00 8.94
Male 6 6 8 Posttesta,b,c 53.73 11.43 32.56 11.99 15.15 7.85
Female 5 2 5
Ethnicity Note. Comparisons were significant at p < .05.
White 11 7 11 a
Latino 0 1 2 Early resolver and good responder; bEarly resolver and poor
responder; cGood responder and poor responder.

210 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
story. In our study, each child listened to an audiotaped story
and looked at the pictures from the wordless picture book,
A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog (Mayer, 1972). The child turned
the page when he or she heard a specific sound on the record-
ing (i.e., a frog’s croak). An examiner sat with the child
during the story to aid in page turning. After listening, the
child retold the story without the book. To create a reason for
the retelling, the child was asked to retell the story into a tape
recorder so that the teacher could listen later (this is an
alternative procedure that is allowed in the SNAP manual).
Procedure
Measurement timeline. The pretest TORF, TOLD–P:3,
and SNAP were administered in April of first grade as part
of a larger assessment battery. Testing was completed in
three, 45-min sessions in each child’s home school. The
assessment battery was administered to the children in the
same order. The TORF was also administered once per week
during the 4-week intervention to the children who received
treatment. The TORF was only administered at pretest and
posttest for the early resolvers.
Narrative analyses. The audiotaped narrative transcripts
were transcribed, segmented, and analyzed at microstructural
and macrostructural levels.
Transcription and segmentation. The narrative language
samples were transcribed and segmented by the third author
according to guidelines of the Systematic Analysis of Lan-
guage Transcripts (SALT; Miller & Chapman, 2004). The
narratives were segmented using communication units
(C-units; Loban, 1963, 1976). A C-unit is “each independent
clause with its modifiers” (Loban, 1976, p. 9) or an elliptical
response. Elliptical responses could be either an answer to
a question whether it only lacked part of the sentence ele-
ments in the question or each yes or no (Loban, 1976). For
the purposes of this study, each yes or no response that was in
response to glossing by the examiner (E: You said the frog
jumped? C: Yes) was omitted from the transcript. Any utter-
ance that did not contribute to the narrative was omitted to
avoid an inflated word count (e.g., Are we done?).
Microstructure analysis. Each transcribed language sam-
ple was individually coded and was run through the SALT
program. The automated SALT analysis provided TNW,
NDW, number of C-units (LENGTH), and mean length of
C-units in words (MLC-W). Four measures were hand coded
by the third author: total number of coordinating conjunctions
(COORD), total number of subordinating conjunctions
(WUBORD), total number of complex C-units (COMPLEX),
and proportion of complex C-units (PROPCOMPLEX).
The INMIS formulae from Justice et al. (2006) were used
to further analyze the microstructure. It should be noted
that Justice et al. reported using minimal terminable units
(T-units) to segment utterances, resulting in a mean length of
T-units in words (MLT-W). A T-unit is similar to but more
restricted than a C-unit, excluding all nonpredicated utterances
(Hunt 1965). However, from the instructions and examples,
along with communication with the authors, it was apparent
that C-units were actually used.
The hand-coded measures were identified following
Justice et al. (2006). COORD consisted of any of seven coor-
dinating conjunctions (e.g., and, for, but, so, nor, or, yet) that
were used to connect two clauses in a C-unit when a sub-
ject was not repeated. For example, “but” was counted in
The dog ran but tripped, but not in The dog ran/but the
cat tripped. The participants frequently used and, and then,
and then as cohesive tools at the beginning of a C-unit, so
these were not included in the COORD count. SUBORD
consisted of any of the 26 subordinating conjunctions pro-
vided by Justice et al. (see Appendix B in Justice et al., 2006,
for a complete list). COMPLEX was coded when a C-unit
contained one or more dependent clauses. All C-units previ-
ously coded with a subordinating conjunction as well as all
other C-units with subordinate clauses, including relative
clauses (e.g., The girl who has red hair is my friend), nomi-
nal clauses (e.g., The frog said, “I am sad.”), and infini-
tive clauses (e.g., I want to go), were coded as complex
utterances. PROPCOMPLEX was the numerical value for
COMPLEX divided by LENGTH.
The INMIS formulae from Justice et al. (2006) were used
to calculate the productivity and complexity of the narratives
produced by each participant. The formulae used to assess
the microstructure of the oral narratives were as follows:
Productivity ¼
1:60 þ ð
0:001  MLC-WÞ þ ð
0:21
 PROPCOMPLEXÞ þ ð0:017  NDWÞ
þ ð
0:00054  TNWÞ þ ð0:014  COORDÞ
þ ð0:0072  SUBORDÞ þ ð0:0094  LENGTHÞ
þ ð0:068  COMPLEXÞ
Complexity ¼
2:84 þ ð0:27  MLC-WÞ þ ð0:85
 PROPCOMPLEXÞ þ ð0:012  NDWÞ
þ ð
0:0027  TNWÞ þ ð0:028  COORDÞ
þ ð0:026  SUBORDÞ þ ð
0:085  LENGTHÞ
þ ð0:14  COMPLEXÞ:
Macrostructure analysis. Episodic structure was analyzed
using guidelines from the SNAP (Strong, 1998). In the SNAP,
a complete episode consists of a complication (e.g., He
wanted a pet frog), an attempt to resolve the complication
(e.g., He went to find a frog), and a consequence of the
attempt (e.g., He tripped over a tree and fell into the water).
To be considered a complete episode, the three elements had
to be presented in that order. The source story consisted of
five complete episodes. Each complete episode from the
story was scored as 1 point. In addition, the number of epi-
sodic elements was scored. One point was assigned for each
statement of setting, initiating event, internal response, at-
tempt, consequence, plan, or reaction.
Narrative scoring reliability. A trained graduate student
in speech-language pathology independently transcribed
and coded one (33%) of the narratives. Word-to-word
match transcription was 91%. Point-to-point agreement
Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 211
on identification of C-units was 93%, subordinating clauses
was 94%, coordinating conjunctions was 89%, and complex
utterances was 100%. Point-to-point agreement on identi-
fication of complete episodes was 94%.
Reading intervention. Two reading interventions were
provided. Children who read ≥10 CWPM were randomly
assigned to either an accuracy or a fluency intervention group.
The original purpose of these two groups ( but not part of
the current study) was to see if these different intervention
focuses had differential effects on assessment measures of
accuracy and fluency. These two groups showed no signif-
icant difference in reading fluency at posttest ( p = .11).
Children who read <10 CWPM were only placed into the
accuracy intervention group. Good and poor responders were
present in both intervention groups. Although there were no
significant differences between the intervention groups in
regard to their reading score, the fluency group represented a
greater proportion of the good responders than did the accu-
racy group (71% vs. 29%). Initial reading status may be
important for entry into the good responder group because
29% of the children who read <10 CWPM entered this group,
whereas 43% of the children who read ≥10 CWPM entered
this group.
The reading accuracy intervention consisted of the Read-
ing Mastery program (Englemann & Bruner, 1998) or the
Proactive Beginning Reading program (a version based on
Open Court; Mathes, Torgesen, Menchetti, Wahl, & Grek,
2001). If the school curriculum was Open Court, then the
child received the Proactive Beginning Reading program.
All other children received the Reading Mastery program. A
placement test was used for each child. Both reading pro-
grams follow a direct instruction approach (Carnine, Silbert,
Kame’enui, & Tarver, 2004) with a focus on word identifi-
cation skills. Children were taught phonemic awareness
skills, letter-sound correspondences, sounding out words,
and recognition of high-frequency irregular words.
The reading fluency intervention consisted of the Read
Naturally materials (Ihnot, 1999). Each child was placed into
graded materials (e.g., Level 0.8, 1.0). A child first read the
story without any practice and charted progress. The child
then listened to a recording of the story twice while follow-
ing along with the text. Next, the child orally read the text
four times. Then the child completed a few comprehension
questions and read the story to a partner. The child read
the story a final time aloud to the interventionist and charted
this performance. The purpose of this intervention was to
improve rapid word identification skills in connected text.
Reading intervention procedures. The reading interven-
tions were provided in individual or paired 30-min lessons
daily in addition to regular classroom reading instruction. All
children attended at least 80% of the sessions. The children
received either small-group or one-to-one instruction pro-
vided by two district educational assistants, two research
assistants, or one graduate student during the regular school
day. All instruction took place in the children’s home schools.
212 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
Fidelity of intervention implementation. The interven-
tionists were provided training before conducting intervention.
Fidelity observation forms (previously developed for other
studies) were used to ensure that the instructors were cor-
rectly implementing the programs. Each component was
scored as 2 for always implemented, 1 for sometimes imple-
mented, and 0 for never implemented. Each interventionist
was formally observed twice between the second and fourth
weeks of intervention. On average, the accuracy intervention
was implemented with 90% fidelity (range of 72%–100%),
and the fluency intervention was implemented with 92%
fidelity (range of 80%–100%).
RESULTS
This study examined the narrative language performance
of three types of at-risk first-grade readers. Analyses of
variance (ANOVAs) with pairwise follow-up comparisons
using the Tukey HSD procedure were conducted, with an
overall alpha level of .05. Effect sizes were calculated as the
standardized mean difference (d ) for pairwise comparisons
and eta-squared (h2) for multiple comparisons. Values >0.80
for d and >0.14 for h2 were considered large (Cohen, 1977).
General Language Skills
The first research question addressed whether there were
group differences among learner groups for total, receptive,
and expressive language as measured by a norm-referenced
discrete skill test of oral language. Total mean score perfor-
mance was almost 1 SD below the mean for all three groups
for total and expressive language. Receptive language was
close to the mean for all three groups (Table 3).
A factorial ANOVA failed to show significant differences
among the three groups for total, F(2, 29) = 0.06, p = .94;
Table 3. Mean standard score and standard deviation for
general language skills by learner type.
Early Good Poor
resolvers responders responders
Measure M SD M SD M SD
Total language 87.2 7.9 86.1 16.1 87.8 9.6
Receptive language 97.5 6.5 102.3 13.4 96.5 11.5
Expressive language 85.5 7.9 83.1 11.7 86.8 10.4
Note. Total language = Spoken Language Quotient of the TOLD–
P:3; Receptive language = Listening Quotient of the Test of
Language Development—Primary (TOLD–P:3; Newcomer &
Hammill, 1997); Expressive language = Speaking Quotient of the
TOLD–P:3. Standard scores based on Mtest of 100 and SD = 15.
No significant differences at p < .05.
receptive, F(2, 29) = 0.76, p = .48; and expressive language,
F(2, 29) = 0.35, p = .71. The standard deviations were ob-
served to be noticeably larger for the good responders, so
Levene’s Test of Equality of Error Variances was calculated.
Results showed that there were no significant differences
in variance between the groups (total p = .27; receptive
p = .09; expressive p = .50).
An additional post hoc test was conducted on the observed
difference between the receptive and expressive language
means. A paired-samples t test indicated that the scores for
receptive language were significantly greater than the scores
for expressive language for all three learner groups: early
resolvers, t(20) = 3.89, p = .0009; good responders, t(14) =
3.05, p = .009; and poor responders, t(24) = 2.26, p = .03.
These results indicated that the three learner types did not
differ significantly on norm-referenced language test scores,
but all three learner types showed significantly lower expres-
sive than receptive results.
across the eight measures. Four measures showed signifi-
cant differences: TNW, F(2, 29) = 7.17, p = .003, h2 = 0.33;
NDW, F(2, 29) = 5.06, p = .013, h2 = 0.26; LENGTH,
F(2, 29) = 6.81, p = .004, h2 = 0.32; and COORD, F(2, 29) =
5.65, p = .008, h2 = 0.28. No significant differences were
obtained for the other four measures: MLC-W, F(2, 29) =
0.07, p = .930, h2 = 0.01; SUBORD: F(2, 29) = 0.89, p = .422,
h2 = 0.06; COMPLEX: F(2, 29) = 1.15, p = .331, h2 = 0.07;
and PROPCOMPLEX: F(2, 29) = 2.06, p = .146, h2 = 0.12.
Follow-up pairwise comparisons were conducted on the
four significant measures (Table 5). Good responders per-
formed significantly better than early resolvers and poor
responders for TNW, NDW, and LENGTH. Good respond-
ers performed significantly better than early resolvers for
COORD. All of these comparisons showed large effect sizes.
The results indicated that good responders had relatively
strong narrative microstructure compared to the similarly
low performance of early resolvers and poor responders.

Narrative Microstructure Productivity and Complexity Indices

The next research question addressed whether there were
group differences in narrative language performance for
eight microstructural measures (Table 4). A multivariate
analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted across the
eight measures and three groups. Wilks L of .36 was signifi-
cant, F(16, 44) = 1.86, p = .05, h2 = 0.40. A conservative
alpha level of .01 was set to control for family-wise error
Table 4. Mean and standard deviation for microstructural
measures by learner type.
The third question addressed whether there were group
differences on two summative measures of microstructure,
productivity and complexity. A factorial ANOVA on pro-
ductivity showed significant differences, F(2, 29) = 4.43,
p = .02, h2 = 0.23 (Table 4). Follow-up pairwise comparisons
revealed the differences to lie between good responders
and early resolvers: Mdifference = 0.60, SE = 0.21, p = .022,
Cohen’s d = 1.29. The differences between good responders
and poor responders narrowly failed to reach significance:
Mdifference = 0.50, SE = 0.20, p = .06, Cohen’s d = 1.11. There

Table 5. Inferential results and effect sizes for the significant

Early Good Poor comparisons of the microstructural measures.
resolvers responders responders
Measure M SD M SD M SD
Mean
a,b
Measure Comparison Difference SE p Cohen’s d
TNW 60.0 32.3 137.9 62.3 77.2 43.8
NDWa,b 34.6 15.8 57.1 17.4 39.1 14.9
LENGTHa,b 9.0 4.7 20.3 8.8 11.5 6.8 TNW Early–Good* 77.88 24.06 .003 1.75
MLC-W 6.8 2.1 7.1 1.0 6.8 1.2 Good–Poor* 60.72 25.15 .016 1.24
COORDa 0.1 0.3 1.00 0.8 0.4 0.7 Early–Poor 17.15 15.57 .635 0.46
SUBORD 1.3 1.2 1.4 1.4 0.8 0.9 NDW Early–Good* 22.49 7.36 .013 1.11
COMPLEX 3.1 2.3 4.8 3.7 3.2 2.0 Good–Poor* 18.05 7.12 .043 1.17
PROPCOMPLEX 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.3 0.2 Early–Poor 4.44 6.49 .774 0.31
Productivity indexa –0.82 0.42 –0.22 0.58 –0.72 0.40 LENGTH Early–Good* 11.25 3.14 .003 1.78
Complexity index –0.75 0.79 –1.43 0.46 –0.98 0.81 Good–Poor* 8.71 3.04 .020 1.22
Early–Poor 2.54 2.77 .635 0.44
COORD Early–Good* 0.91 0.28 .006 1.69
Note. TNW = total number of words; NDW = number of different
Good–Poor 0.62 0.32 .067 0.85
words; LENGTH = number of C-units; MLC-W = mean length of
Early–Poor 0.29 0.20 .450 0.56
utterance in words; COORD = number of coordinating conjunctions;
SUBORD = number of subordinating conjunctions; COMPLEX =
number of C-units containing at least one dependent clause; Note. Only comparisons that were significant on a prior factorial
PROPCOMPLEX = COMPLEX/LENGTH. analysis of variance are listed. Good = good responders, Poor =
a
Early resolver and good responder comparison significant at poor responders, early = early resolvers. Cohen’s d was calculated
p < .05; bGood responder and poor responder comparison signifi- with means and standard deviations.
cant at p < .05. *significant at p = .05.

Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 213

were no significant differences between the early resolvers
and the poor responders: Mdifference = 0.10, SE = 0.19,
p = .847, Cohen’s d = 0.26.
A factorial ANOVA on complexity showed no signifi-
cant differences: F(2, 29) = 2.00, p = .154, h2 = 0.12. No
follow-up pairwise comparisons were conducted. Good re-
sponders did not produce more complex language than the
other two learner types, despite the finding that they produced
more narrative language than the other two learner types.
Narrative Macrostructure
The final question required an examination of group
differences for the macrostructural measures of number of
complete episodes and number of episodic elements. The
mean number of episodes was highest but most variable
for the good responders (Table 6). A factorial ANOVA for
episode showed no significant differences among the groups,
F(2, 29) = 2.29, p = .120, h2 = 0.14.
A factorial ANOVA for total number of episodic elements
showed significant differences among the groups: F(2, 29) =
4.53, p = .019, h2 = 0.24. The good responders provided
significantly more episodic elements than the early resolvers:
Mdifference = 9.23, SE = 3.13, p = .02, Cohen’s d = 1.53. There
were no significant differences between the good respond-
ers and the poor responders: Mdifference = 6.88, SE = 3.03,
p = .076, Cohen’s d = 0.95; nor between the poor responders
and the early resolvers: Mdifference = 2.34, SE = 2.76, p = .677,
Cohen’s d = 0.40. These results indicate that the good re-
sponders provided more story grammar elements in their
narrative retellings than did the early resolvers.
DISCUSSION
General Language Skills for Three Types
of At-Risk Readers
The first goal of this study was to determine whether
general language skills, as measured by a norm-referenced
Table 6. Mean and standard deviation for episodic structure
by group.
Early Good Poor
resolvers responders responders
M SD M SD M SD
Number of complete 0.18 0.40 1.00 1.60 0.23
episodes
Number of episodic 9.27 4.56 18.50 8.32 11.62
elementsa
a
Early resolver and good responder comparison significant at p < .05.
test, differed for three types of first graders who had been
identified as being at risk for reading difficulties. General
language skills were evaluated using composite scores on
total language, receptive language, and expressive language.
There were no significant differences between the three
types of at-risk readers for any of the measures of general
language skills. In regard to overall language, all three groups
were performing almost 1 SD below the mean. Interestingly,
the receptive language of all three groups was near the
mean, whereas their expressive language performance was
significantly lower than the mean. A review of the individ-
ual expressive test scores indicated that 50% of the good
responders (n = 4) performed more than 1 SD below the
mean, as did 31% of the poor responders (n = 4) and 55% of
the early resolvers (n = 6). The expressive subtests on the
TOLD–P:3 were limited to vocabulary and sentence structure
tasks with limited production demands, but this was enough
to tap a different set of skills from the receptive subtests.
The expressive subtests showed that all three learner types
were weak in expressive language. However, the norm-
referenced measure failed to reveal differences among the
three groups.
Narrative Language Performance for Three
Types of At-Risk Readers
The second goal of this study was to determine whether
narrative language performance differed among three types
of first graders who had been identified as being at risk for
reading difficulties through an RTI process. Narrative
retells were evaluated at microstructural and macrostruc-
tural levels.
Microstructure. Eight microstructural measures were
evaluated across the three types of at-risk readers. Good
responders performed significantly better than the other two
groups on measures related to amount of talk: TNW, NDW, and
LENGTH. Good responders performed significantly better
than early resolvers for COORD and the overall productivity
index, which is a variably weighted combination of eight
microstructural measures. Effect sizes for these differences
were all large (d values of 1.11 to 1.78).
The microstructural measures of complexity generally
did not show significant differences among the three learner
types. Good responders were significantly stronger on one
measure of complexity, NDW, which is primarily a semantic
measure. Good responders provided, on average, È57 differ-
ent words of the 150 possible; the other two groups pro-
vided <40 words each.
The other contributors to complexity were primarily syn-
tactic (MLC-W, COORD, SUBORD, COMPLEX, and
0.60
PROPCOMPLEX). These, along with the complexity index,
7.23 did not show even a consistent trend toward superiority for
any of the groups. Syntax is the most consistent marker of
specific LI (Leonard, 1998) but did not differentiate among
these at-risk groups.

214 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
 For COORD, or clausal coordination, all three groups, on
average, produced fewer than one clausal coordinator. The
source story only provided five examples of clausal coordi-
nation using and within a C-unit. For the most part, the
children did not produce a modified utterance but simply
omitted the compound sentence from their retell. The lack of
utterances containing and in the participant retells contrasts
with its early developmental appearance (Owens, 2008;
Retherford, 2000). However, this may be due to the clausal
coordinator scoring system. C-unit segmentation requires
an utterance division at the clausal coordinator if a second
subject is present (Loban, 1976), resulting in an utterance-
initial and for the second utterance. This use of and was
considered a discourse component, as a continuer and marker
of the main story line (Peterson & McCabe, 1991), not an
intrasentential connector. Additionally, the COORD variable
was scored for the coordination of verbs (e.g., running and
jumping) but not nouns (e.g., frog and friend ) that served
to conjoin clauses within a C-unit. These restrictions lowered
the number of coordinating uses of and that were scored.
But was also used to initiate a C-unit but rarely appeared
despite its presence three times in the source story.
Other than COORD, the syntactic measures are different
but overlapping aspects of subordination. The source story
used 22 tokens (only 1 token per C-unit could be counted,
resulting in 20 as the maximum for COMPLEX) that contrib-
uted to COMPLEX (6 subordinating conjunctions, 2 nominal
dependent clauses, and 14 infinitive clauses). The children
reproduced few of these subordinating structures, with mean
performance across the three groups at È3.5 tokens. Infini-
tive clauses, which are early appearing structures (Owens,
2008; Retherford, 2000) and are not counted as measures of
complexity by some authors (e.g., Hughes, McGillivray, &
Schmidek, 1997; Justice & Ezell, 2002), were rarely used
by the participants. Across the three groups, the early resolv-
ers provided a mean of only 1.6 (SD = 1.6) infinitives, the
good responders provided a mean of 3.6 (SD = 2.7) infinitives,
and the poor responders provided a mean of 2.5 (SD = 1.8).
It should be noted that the INMIS indices may be of
unexpected magnitudes, and care should be taken in inter-
preting them. The good responders exemplified this: Their
complexity score was the lowest of the three groups, al-
though their performance on the eight contributing measures
was as high or higher than those of the other two groups.
Their lower complexity score was due to the good respond-
ers having produced more narrative language than the other
two groups, but with similar complexity. It appears that
the expectation of the INMIS complexity index is that there
should be more evidence of complex narrative language
within the longer narratives.
Macrostructure. The narratives were also evaluated for
macrostructural episodic organization. Good responders
provided a mean of 1.0 complete episodes and 18 episodic
elements, compared to <0.25 complete episodes and
<12 episodic elements for the other two groups. Only the
difference between the episodic elements of good respond-
ers and early resolvers was significant, but the overall
pattern suggested a relative strength for the good responders.
The episodic structure analysis scored only episodes that
were retold from the source story, not from any original epi-
sodes. Examination of the narratives showed that the chil-
dren produced only modeled episodes. Good responders
were also distinguished on how many participants attempted
all five episodes modeled (5 of 8 children), compared to the
other two groups (early resolvers = 0 of 11 children; poor
responders = 3 of 13 children).
Most children attempted at least three episodes but often
failed to complete the episodes. When participants addressed
an episode, they tended to omit the complication, initiating
their retell with an attempt to solve the complication (e.g.,
so he followed the footprints) followed by a consequence.
These results are similar to those for third- and fifth-grade
children who retold stories that included more attempts and
outcomes than complications (Goldman & Varnhagen, 1986)
and for 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds who also tended to omit com-
plications in generated narratives (Peterson & McCabe, 1983).
In sum, in our study, microstructural narrative produc-
tivity measures and the macrostructural measure of num-
ber of episodic elements were shown to distinguish among
three types of at-risk learners. Where significant differences
were found, good responders consistently outperformed the
other two learner types.
Language Performance Compared
to Typical Learners
The research questions in this study concerned patterns of
narrative language performance across RTI-identified learner
types. However, the use of a norm-referenced test and a
standardized narrative sampling procedure that has age com-
parison data allowed for consideration of how the language
of these at-risk learners compared to that of typical learners.
The norm-referenced TOLD–P:3 showed marginal over-
all language ability for all three learner groups in regard to
mean standard score performance of 87.03. Sixty-three per-
cent of the children (n = 20) showed performance in the
lower quartile (standard score of ≤90) that RTI is intended
to flag. Thirty-one percent (n = 10) scored <85, or less than
the 16th percentile, which warrants referral for a special
education evaluation.
The narrative analysis showed similar low performance for
all three learner types. On average, the three groups of children
were missing most of the story in their retells. There were
almost 400 words in the source story (Appendix). TNW was
137.9 for the good responders, 60.0 for the early resolvers, and
77.2 for the poor responders. This was still only approximately
one-third of the source story vocabulary. Appendix J1 of
1
Two versions of SNAP were published in 1998. One version contains
198 pages and the other contains 206 pages with Appendix J.
Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 215
the SNAP manual presents field-test data for 7-year-olds, for
which a similar elicitation procedure, including the same
storybook, was used. For 13 TD children, the SNAP reported
a TNW of 166.7 words (SD = 70.1), and for 13 children with
LI, a TNW of 82.8 words (SD = 31.9). Although the good
responders’ performance appropriately fell between that of
the two SNAP groups, the performance of the poor respond-
ers and early resolvers was like that of the children with LI.
NDW was not reported for the SNAP data, so that comparison
could not be made.
For MLC-W, the three learner types produced utterance
lengths of approximately seven words. This was slightly
below the level of both children with typical and language
impaired performance in the SNAP field-test data. Interest-
ingly, considering the emphasis in language sampling on
average sentence length (whether as MLU, MLC-W, or
MLT-W), the SNAP showed essentially no difference be-
tween typical development and LI (M = 7.6, SD = 0.9;
M = 7.4, SD = 1.5). No comparison was made for the other
complexity measures because of differences in how the
scoring was conducted.
Performance of these participants on episodic elements
can again be compared to the SNAP field-test data. For
children with TD language, the data showed a mean of 2.1
complete episodes (SD = 1.3); for children with LI, the data
showed a mean of 0.6 complete episodes (SD = 0.8). The
episodic structure of the narratives from the study participants,
particularly the early resolvers and the poor responders,
resemble the episodic structure of the narratives from the
group with LI.
This exploration of comparison data, obtained in a similar
manner but outside this study, showed weaknesses in lan-
guage for children who had been identified using code-based
measures. Despite the relative strengths in productivity
and vocabulary, even the good responders reproduced only
one-third of the source story. However, performance of the
other two learner types closely resembled that of children
with LI, which puts these learners, who have not been
identified as language impaired, at risk for linguistic difficul-
ties in addition to decoding and reading fluency.
Subtypes of At-Risk Readers: More Than
Just Decoding
First graders who did not meet grade-level reading fluency
benchmarks were grouped into three learner types. The
findings suggest that, in addition to decoding differences,
these groups have distinctive narrative language patterns.
These patterns provide an important additional dimension
to the performance of young at-risk readers.
General language skills did not differ among the learner
types. In addition, receptive and expressive norm-referenced
scores showed similar performance. The expressive compo-
site, based on tasks with only word and sentence construc-
tion or imitation requirements, does not really reflect the
216 LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND HEARING SERVICES IN SCHOOLS • Vol. 43 • 205–221 • April 2012
demands of producing and organizing expressive discourse.
As a result, it was not surprising that it did not show the same
pattern across learner types as the narrative retell results.
For narrative language performance, good responders,
who were children with initially low reading scores who met
grade-level expectations for growth, stood out above the
other two groups. Compared to the other two learner types,
good responders recalled and produced more of the stories
they heard, showed greater semantic diversity, and presented
better episodic structure. Verbal output and vocabulary have
consistently differentiated language and reading disabili-
ties (e.g., Fey et al., 2004; Scott & Windsor, 2000), as has
episodic structure (Merritt & Liles, 1987; Ripich & Griffith,
1988; Roth & Spekman, 1986).
Good responders did not differ significantly on the com-
plexity measures, but the other areas of relative strength
suggest that good responders had some of the linguistic abili-
ties needed for success in reading, especially as emphasis
switches to comprehension. These findings are consistent
with an RTI model that predicts that such children were only
experientially deficient rather than having an inherent learn-
ing disability. However, the comparisons with the data
reported in Strong (1998), and the wide variability on the
norm-referenced test, suggest that even the language skills
of the good responders still warrant further monitoring and
possibly supplementary support.
Poor responders showed a clear language profile of con-
cern. However, they are likely to eventually receive the
attention they need. Not only did they perform inadequately
at the end of intervention, but they also performed inade-
quately at the outset of intervention, as more poor responders
than good responders scored in the lowest level of read-
ing fluency. Five of the seven children (71%) who read
<10 CWPM became poor responders, whereas eight of the
14 children (57%) who read ≥10 CWPM became poor
responders. These persistently low performers either will be
flagged for further prereferral Tier III intervention and then
a referral for special education or may be referred directly
for evaluation. Either of these routes is likely to lead to a
comprehensive examination of language as well as decoding
performance.
The results did not support the hypothesis that the group
of children who did not require reading intervention, early
resolvers, would perform significantly better than the other
two groups on measures of narrative skills. Despite their
learning strengths—they resolved their initial reading fluency
difficulties with only regular classroom instruction—the
early resolvers’ linguistic performance was significantly
below that of the good responders, with large effect sizes
for the differences. These results are similar to those found
by Bishop et al. (2009) in that there are samples of chil-
dren with LI who present with accurate word reading skills.
Early resolvers were similar in language performance to
the group of clear concern, poor responders, but the early
resolvers were in an even more problematic situation. The
group’s on-track status for code-based skills overshadows
their current linguistic needs. The risk for future difficul-
ties appears high for this group due to the absence of a
“language-track” RTI model (Ukrainetz, 2006a). Their
weaknesses will not be identified until reading and academic
performances are affected sufficiently for a special education
referral. The nonconsideration of linguistic skills puts this
group of children into a “wait to fail” model.
The central implication of this study is that RTI models
should consider language in addition to decoding. A sub-
group of at-risk readers, the early resolvers, met the bench-
mark criterion for accurately and fluently decoding connected
text. If narrative performance had been used to determine
responsiveness, then these children may have continued to
be identified as at risk and may have been provided supple-
mentary support. These findings suggest that a sensitive
measure of language performance should be added to evalu-
ations of early risk for reading difficulties.
Study Limitations and Future Directions
There were several limitations of this study. A major
limitation was in the use of extant data, which limited the
study design choices. A comparison group of typical readers
from the same district would have been more informative
and procedurally robust than the norm-referenced scores and
SNAP age reference information.
Language performance following intervention would
have been very helpful in understanding the implications of
the narrative language patterns obtained and the effects of
code-based intervention on language performance. It is pos-
sible that the therapeutic attention that the children received
during the intervention, even though it did not explicitly
target narrative skills, may have indirectly and positively
impacted their language skills. The effects of active controls
in recent studies suggest the power of repeated opportunities
for motivated and attentive language interactions (Gillam
et al., 2008; Ukrainetz, Ross, & Harm, 2009). Another con-
sideration is that the type of intervention provided may have
a differential impact on narrative language performance.
If a second narrative retell had been elicited after the inter-
vention was completed, then one would have been able to
investigate the impact of a fluency-based intervention that
uses a complete discourse unit versus an accuracy-based inter-
vention that mostly uses single word and sentence level units.
The use of a norm-referenced measure of narrative abil-
ity such as the TNL may have been more informative in
regard to the performance of the children in comparison to
a peer group. The TNL requires full narrative productions
from children, so it might have revealed these subtle group
differences more than the TOLD–P:3, but that possibility
remains speculative. At the time of the data collection, the
TNL had not been published.
A significant concern involved the sample size. Although
a sample of 32 participants may be sufficient to detect
differences between TD children and children with LI or
reading impairment, it provides relatively low power for a
three-way comparison among more subtly different groups
of children. This would have been difficult to remedy; an
entire school district was needed to locate this number of
children. Only 10.6% of the children in the district qualified
as being at risk for reading difficulties and moved into
Tier II instruction. A large-scale multiyear evaluation of
schoolwide universal screening showed 15% of children
advancing to Tier II instruction (VanDerHeyden, Witt, &
Gilbertson, 2007). The lower percentage of Tier II chil-
dren in this district contrasts with a report suggesting the
opposite: that children are being overidentified with the
high expectations of the current DIBELS (Catts, Petscher,
Schatschneider, Bridges, & Mendoza, 2008). The reasons
for the lower number identified may be due to the strength
of the core curriculum provided within the school district,
but no matter the reason, this did result in an undesirably
small sample.
The INMIS scores obtained in this study were not com-
pared to those of Justice et al. (2006) because of the differ-
ences in the narrative elicitation procedures. Age-referenced
language sample information is often used without refer-
ence to elicitation context (e.g., SALT reports separately for
conversation and narrative but collapses across data col-
lected using diverse procedures). However, elicitation proce-
dures do have an impact on narrative language. Merritt and
Liles (1987) found that children with and without language
disorders produced narratives of a similar length with story
generation tasks but were differentiated by length for a story
retell task. In regard to macrostructure, Schneider and Dube
(2005) found that children produced more story grammar
units for a story retell task than a story generation task sup-
ported by pictures. Thus, although the INMIS was helpful
in making within-study comparisons, it could not be used
across different elicitation procedures. To better understand
and validate the INMIS as a clinical tool, studies should
use the same narrative elicitation contexts or ones that sys-
tematically vary from the original.
Finally, investigators need to be clear on the segmentation
unit and rules used. T-units and C-units were developed more
than 40 years ago by Hunt (1965) for analyzing writing
and by Loban (1963) for analyzing spoken language. T-units
are limited to grammatically complete sentences, whereas
C-units additionally include ellipses and fragments. To ana-
lyze by T-units, many utterances (e.g., A boy, a dog, and a
frog; Yeah; Me too; Maybe she was; The end ) must be omit-
ted from the transcript. Confusion between segmentation
units will have a significant effect on conversation, with its
heavy use of elliptical utterances, with less effect on mono-
logic narration (Allen, Ukrainetz, & Petersen, 2010). How-
ever, even for narrative studies, if inconsistent application
occurs, such as if the SALT program is used to automatically
count all of the transcribed utterances (i.e., C-units) for “total
number of utterances” and hand coding is used to count
Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 217
the proportion of complex to grammatically complete utter-
ances (i.e., T-units), internally inconsistent results will be
obtained.
Conclusion
This study investigated the oral language performance
of first graders who had been identified as being at risk
for reading difficulties through an RTI process. A norm-
referenced language test did not reveal differences across
learner types for general language skills. However, narrative
analyses were sensitive to differences: Children who re-
sponded well to intervention showed stronger narrative
language performance than children who did not respond
adequately to intervention or children who resolved without
intervention. Good responders retold more of the source
story, with greater semantic diversity and more episodic
elements. There were no significant differences among the
groups for syntactic complexity. Norm-referenced expres-
sive language performance and comparison to field-test
data from Strong (1998) suggested that the three groups, but
most especially the early resolvers and poor responders,
performed similar to children with LI.
In conclusion, the results of this preliminary retrospective
small sample study indicate that children who have been
identified as different kinds of learners through an RTI pro-
cess have some significant differences in narrative language
performance. Children of greatest concern are those who,
despite initial difficulties, meet growth expectations in their
reading fluency without intervention. These children may
have language deficits that will not be flagged until they are
in serious educational distress. Evaluation of narrative lan-
guage performance, in particular analyses that capture produc-
tivity and episodic elements, should be added to RTI models.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to Amy Peterson for assisting with reliability.
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APPENDIX. OCCURRENCES OF MACROSTRUCTURAL AND
MICROSTRUCTURAL FEATURES IN THE SOURCE STORY

Feature Value

TNW 396.00
NDW 150.00
LENGTH 44.00
MLC 9.00
COORD 5.00
SUBORD 6.00
COMPLEX 20.00
PROPCOMPLEX .45
Complete episodes 5.00
Episodic elements 54.00

Note. TNW = total number of words; NDW = number of different words; LENGTH =
number of C-units; MLC = mean length of utterance in words; COORD = number
of coordinating conjunctions; SUBORD = number of subordinating conjunctions;
COMPLEX = number of C-units containing at least one dependent clause;
PROPCOMPLEX = COMPLEX/LENGTH; Complete episodes = number of
complete episodes; Episodic elements = number of episodic elements.

Allen et al.: Narratives of At-Risk Readers 221

 The Narrative Language Performance of Three Types of At-Risk First-Grade
Readers

Melissa M. Allen, Teresa A. Ukrainetz, and Alisa L. Carswell

Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch 2012;43;205-221; originally published online Jan 9,
2012;
DOI: 10.1044/0161-1461(2011/11-0024)

This information is current as of April 5, 2012

This article, along with updated information and services, is

located on the World Wide Web at:
http://lshss.asha.org/cgi/content/full/43/2/205

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