Investigating the impact of oral narrative interventions

This thesis firstly considers the literature relating to oral narrative interventions. It investigates the effectiveness of such interventions in terms of oral narrative skills; production and comprehension, reading comprehension and behaviour, notably class participation. It concludes that the evidence base to support the implementation of oral narrative interventions in order to promote oral narrative skills is limited.

The empirical paper moves on to describe the core research work central to this thesis. This work explored the impact of an oral narrative intervention on Year 8 High School pupils' oral narrative skills. This work intended to investigate whether any improvements in pupils' narrative skills were related to changes in pupils' behaviour or their self perceptions.

The measure used to assess narrative ability in this study was the Expression Reception Recall of Narrative Instrument (Bishop, 2004). A secondary research question of this study was to examine whether there was practice effects associated with repeated testing on this measure.

The critical reflection provides the rationale for selection of the design, measures and methods of analysis. In addition highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the study and sets out some of the implications for future research.

This section also outlines what the original contribution of this study was. It ends with a reflection on the authors comments on their learning over the course of the research project.