Didactics strategies to develop the narrative discourse in preschool children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) may present difficulties in the development of their narrative discourse, which may damage their school learning process. There is little information on didactic strategies applied into Chilean classroom to enhance narrative discourse development of students who present this type of language impairment. For that reason, during three months we carried out a quasi-experimental research with pre and post-test administration on a group of 16 preschoolers who present SLI and evident difficulties to tell stories, with the aim of stimulating their narrative skills development through didactic strategies applied into the classroom. These strategies were designed considering students' language characteristics as well as the evolutionary development of the narrative discourse. During the development of this research, most of the pupils showed a significant evolution, reaching some of them an expected level for their chronological ages. However, it was not possible to identify the level of development achieved by each student due to the fact that some of them manifested severe phonetic-phonological difficulties while others showed a disparate performance in didactic activities and formal assessments. From this, it is possible to identify the existence of factors that affect the quality of the students' stories, which should be considered for an effective evaluation and stimulation of their narrative skills.