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There are various approaches to the assessment of narrative content. The primary purpose of this study was to compare three methods of assessing narrative macrostructure to determine whether these methods address the same or different aspects of narratives. The secondary purpose was to compare the productivity and complexity of oral and written narratives to identify modality differences for typically developing fourth-grader children. As children get older, written narratives are expected to take on greater complexity than oral narratives. Oral and written narratives were elicited from 21 fourth grade students with typical language skills. The narratives were scored using Story Level Rating (Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977), Percentage of Dyadic Constituents (Gillam & Johnston, 1992), and the Index of Narrative Complexity (Petersen, Gillam & Gillam, 2008). The overall lack of significant correlations between the scoring methods suggests that the different scoring methods assess different aspects of narrative macrostructure. The children exhibited greater productivity and complexity in their oral narratives than in their written narratives. Implications for narrative assessment for children with typical and impaired language will be discussed. |
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