The Effect of an Expository Intervention on Strategy Use and Oral Expression of Informational Texts for Adolescents With Learning Disabilities.

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of an expository strategy intervention called Sketch and Speak on strategy use and oral reporting of informational texts for students with language-learning disabilities (LLD).

Method: Four adolescents with LLD participated in a single-case multiple-baseline-across-participants treatment experiment. Ten individual treatment sessions involved shared reading of an informational article, identifying important or interesting ideas to remember, making pictographic or bulleted notes paired with oral sentence formulation and rehearsal, and orally rehearsing the final full report. Following each baseline and treatment session, participants had an opportunity to review their notes and then gave a free-recall oral report and answered content and strategy awareness questions. Pre/post measures of independent strategy use and oral reporting were also administered.

Results: All participants learned pictography and improved their written notes, strategy awareness, and quality of oral reports compared to baseline. Three participants improved their independent note-taking, oral reports, and strategy awareness on proximal tasks. One participant showed independent oral rehearsal within treatment and on the proximal transfer task. In the distal independence task, all the participants showed some improvement in planning notes format but none for explanations of a familiar sport/game. One participant used pictography for any task in which there was a choice of notation format.

Conclusions: Sketch and Speak provides an effective set of teaching strategies to improve informational oral reporting for older students with LLD. Students may generalize improved note-taking as a learning strategy to similar tasks, but independent oral rehearsal is more difficult to obtain.