Narrative Discourse and Parents’ Story Telling at Home to Preschool Children who Present Language Impairment

Abstract

The study aimed to analyze the productive narrative discourse of students who attended kindergarten in special language schools in Chile, considering the expressive and mixed Specific Language Impairment (SLI) with the periodicity of reading stories at home. Enriched natural environments into the family provide better opportunities to develop early literacy, linguistic and social skills. Children with SLI may show difficulties in narration, affecting academic, social performance, and generally affecting their quality of life. The narrative discourse in a sample of 150 preschoolers was evaluated using a formal instrument that included the retelling of three original stories. The performance of narrative development and reading stories by parents at home were examined. A form was applied to collect demographic information from families. Through a comparative-descriptive study, descriptive and inferential statistics (two-way ANOVA) were used to analyze the variables. The results show that type of SLI, frequency of reading and the interaction of both variables did not cause statistically significant effects in the narrative discourse. However, qualitative findings were observed, in the quantity of oral discourse related to storytelling.