THE DETECTION AND NARRATIVE SKILLS INTERVENTION IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS

The narrative discourse is one of the core skills in language development, and it is also very connected with school learning. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have problems in both production and narrative understanding. The objective of this research was to detect and intervene in the narrative discourse of a group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In this research, the sample included a total of 35 SLI students from 19 schools on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). CELF-3, Peabody, Hearing Association and the Visual Association Test ITPA subtests as well as the K-BIT IQ tests were used. A narrative analysis was also made from the task of retelling the story Frog, where are you? 72 intervention sessions of 30 minutes each, following the Functional - Narrative Language Intervention Program (FLIP-N), were applied to children with SLI. The used strategies were based on intensive and repeated visual support, scaffolding and interactive modeling. The results produced, firstly, a significant improvement in the narrative production and more specifically, in the superstructure, in word production, clauses, coordinated sentences and subordinate adjectival clauses, and secondly, in understanding narrative. This data confirms the utility of the program to act on cognitive and linguistic aspects of narrative students with SLI. The educational implications are obvious as they take positive action on a complex skill, closely connected with school learning in general, and reading comprehension in particular.