An Intervention Research Of Story Structure Instruction On Narrative Writing Skills Of Children With Mild Intellectual Disabilities

Writing is a critical skill for individuals in their academic,professional,and social pursuits.Mastering some writing skills helps individuals to communicate effectively,think positively,increase the chance of better learning opportunities after compulsory schooling,etc.However,children with intellectual disabilities have greater challenges in writing due to limitations in working memory and intellectual level,mainly in recording and sequencing ideas,setting up a writing plan,outputting complete elements and well-organized texts,as well as self-checking and revising their work.Current research on the writing skills of children with intellectual disabilities is relatively limited,and there is a dearth of intervention studies on writing skills among them.Research has shown that story structure instruction can be conducive to improve children’s writing skills by providing them with a narrative framework that helps them to analyze and plan the content of their writing,which in turn reduces their memory load during the writing process,and in the meantime the narrative framework also serves as a basis for writers to check and revise their texts.Therefore,this study adopts story structure instruction to intervene in the writing skills of children with mild intellectual disabilities in order to explore effective writing intervention methods.This study uses a multiple-probe across subjects design of single-case experimental methodology,and the whole experiment is divided into a baseline period,an intervention period and a maintenance period,with story structure instruction as the independent variable and writing skills of children with intellectual disabilities as the dependent variable.Collecting and taking pictures of life scenarios with school and family as the background in the subjects’ life situations,subjects use them as writing materials.The subjects’ writing skills were assessed in terms of story structure elements,material selection and organization skills,expression skill,self-regulation skill,and production volume.Two weeks after the end of the intervention,the effects of story structure instruction on the maintenance of the three subjects’ writing skills were examined by the subjects randomly selecting the life scenario pictures as writing materials during the maintenance period.In this study,the experimental data of the three subjects were analyzed by using visual analysis and calculating Tau-U effect size at the end of the experiment,and the following conclusions were drawn:First,story structure instruction can be effective in improving the narrative writing skills of children with mild intellectual disabilities,with good intervention and maintenance effects.Second,story structure instruction had great intervention effects on all dimensions of narrative writing skills of children with mild intellectual disabilities,with the intervention effects of story structure elements,expressiveness,and productivity being better than those of selection organization and self-regulation;and the maintenance effects of story structure elements,expressiveness,selection organization,and self-regulation being better than those of productivity.Based on the results of the study,the following suggestions are put forward for future practice of using story structure instruction to improve the writing skills of children with mild mental disability: first,teaching sentence writing in combination with examples to improve the skill to use long sentences and enhance the coherence within texts;second,strengthening character description training to enhance the vividness and authenticity of the text;third,teaching writing in combination with oral narrative training to strengthen the narrative structure;fourth,providing computer-assisted writing support to reduce writing and grammatical errors and finally improve the quality of checking and revising.