Story Composition by Learning Disabled, Reading Disabled, and Normal ChildrenNORMAL CHILDREN
Barbara F. Nodine, Edna Barenbaum, and Phyllis Newcomer
Abstract. Investigations into children's ability to comprehend and compose stories have been increasing steadily during the past 10 years. As a result, a body of information exists that has important implications for educators. In this article we will present background information about the most influential sources in children's understanding of stories. Also, we will report an investigation of the written composition skills of normal and handicapped learners.
Writing an original story is a common childhood activity. Research on how children compose a story stems from three sources: (a) Britton's (1970) work on the use of language in school learning; (b) several decades of investiga- tions into children's reading comprehension; and (c) Applebee's (1978) studies of children's con- ceptions of a story.
James Britton and his colleagues (1970) have studied written language extensively. They classify compositions on a continuum where the most basic or primitive writing is classified as ex- pressive, while more advanced work branches into either poetic or transactional writing. Ex- pressive writing is closest to thought, serving the writer's interests without concern for the reader. Notations in diaries are examples of expressive writing. In contrast, transactional writing is designed to have some effect on a reader (e.g., a persuasive letter, an informative report, or direc- tions for solving a problem). Poetic writing, in turn, appeals to the reader's aesthetic sensibilities in the form of a poem or song or, relevant to this study, a story. In an extension of Britton's work, Temple, Nathan, and Burris (1982) showed that young children's beginning writing is expressive and undergoes transitions as it becomes either transactional or poetic. The expressive writings of a young child have few qualities of a story. Thus, a reader might enjoy the story written by a young child in the expressive stage because of
his/her interest in the writer, but usually not for its qualities as a story.
The second avenue of investigation into children's stories, research into reading com- prehension, has focused upon the manner in which events in stories are understood and remembered. From this research the concept of story schema has been defined (Mandler, 1984; Stein & Policastro, 1984). Another direction of story comprehension research is the application of cohesion theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983).
Story schema is a set of expectations about the structure of stories that make both comprehen- sion and recall more efficient. The schema is a general framework that includes a hierarchical ordering of story elements with components related causally or temporally. The schema represents a person's conception of how a typical story is organized from beginning to end.
Story schema research has led to two general conclusions. First, an individual's knowledge of story components appears to facilitate com-
BARBARA F. NODINE, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Beaver College. EDNA BARENBAUM, Ph.D., is Assistant Pro- fessor, Cabrini College. PHYLLIS NEWCOMER, Ph.D., is Professor, Department of Education, Beaver College.
Volume 8, Summer 1985 167
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prehension of and memory for stories. When stories are organized canonically, increasing the availability of the story schema, the stories are remembered better. Research into memory of disorganized stories has shown that readers ten~d to supply their own rules for organization and, therefore, remember disorganized stories as be- ing canonically organized (Mandler, 1984; Stein & Glenn, 1982; Whaley, 1981a, 1981b). Sec- ond, the use and complexity of story schema in- crease with age (Stein & Glenn, 1982).
A slightly varied type of research into story schema focuses not so much upon comprehen- sion as upon the manner in which a story can be differentiated from a non-story. Some of that research has attempted to identify the elements of a grammar of stories that are essential to the definition of a story. It is beyond the scope of this paper to review those grammars and summarize their similarities and differences, because that research analyzed multi-episode stories of some complexity. More relevant to this study is the work of Prince (1973), who defined the essential elements of the simplest possible story. Prince argued that to be a minimal story, a piece of writing must contain at least three units, with the first and third as states, and the second as an event that causes a change in the third state. For example, "John was sad. Then John met woman. As a result, John was happy." In a similar vein, Bremond (cited in Poulsen, Kintsch, Kintsch, & Premack, 1979) suggested three basic elements to define a story: exposi- tion, via some action, a complicating action, and eventually a resolution. Definitions of a minimal story, rather than an ideal story, are more useful when the stories to be studied are those com- posed by children lacking sophisticated story- making skills.
As mentioned earlier, another means of evaluating stories invokes the concept of cohe- sion (Johnson-Laird, 1983). According to Johnson-Laird, story grammars cannot define stories independently of the content, and cohe- sion is a necessary and sufficient condition for a type of discourse. Coherence depends upon co- reference, the linking of one sentence to the next so that a reader can understand. In reading a story, or any piece of discourse, a reader must make some inferences in order to understand the meaning of the text. In the example above of a simple story, a reader infers that John met the
woman and had some type of meaningful per- sonal relationship. We do not infer that she was simply a salesperson at his local grocery story. It is expected even of beginning readers that they understand a text in a way that goes beyond the meaning of each discrete word in the sentence. Reading instruction is based on both decoding of words and on the inferred meaning the reader acquires. Sophisticated readers vary in the abstractness of the inferences they draw. Literary criticism is based on the range of possible in- ferences that accomplished readers can draw from a text.
Finally, in evaluating young children's oral stories, Applebee (1978) found a relationship between adequacy of composing a story and the length of that story, or fluency. He identified six increasingly more adequate oral narrative stories (heaps, sequences, primitive narratives, un- focused chains, focused chains, narratives) told by young children. After covarying the effects of age, he found that preschoolers produced in- creasingly longer stories, in a ratio of 5 to 1 from the most primitive form of a story to proper nar- rative form. As children gained control of the story form, they also became more fluent.
This combined research gives us reason to believe that children use story schema for both comprehension and recall of stories, become more fluent as they master the story form, and produce less egocentric compositions as they mature. However, little research has addressed the extent to which children use story schema in composing and writing stories. Also lacking are studies of the relationships between fluency and story schema in written compositions and the im- portance of cohesion in written stories. An addi- tional relevant area left uninvestigated is whether children identified as having serious reading problems and general learning disabilities use story schema in writing in a manner similar to their normal peers.
One might hypothesize that children who have difficulty with reading (reading disabled), and those whose academic and behavioral deficits have resulted in special education place- ment (learning disabled), may not have developed the same schematic awareness of a story as their normal reading peers. Thus, more of their written compositions may be non-stories as defined by criteria based on Prince and Bre- mond. Such non-stories reflect various degrees
168 Learning Disability Quarterly
of inadequacy in incorporating the characteristics of a story. A second hypothesis, based on Brit- ton's conception, is that these learning disabled and reading disabled children's stories tend to be expressive rather than poetic, that is, children will write idiosyncratic remarks rather than stories. A third hypothesis concerns Johnson- Laird's notion of cohesion. Learning disabled students should produce compositions with less cohesion than those produced by reading dis- abled students. Both problematic groups should produce fewer cohesive compositions than nor- mals. Finally, according to a fourth hypothesis, the stories of the reading and learning disabled children will show less language fluency. They will be shorter and choppier. This study was designed to investigate these four hypotheses.
METHOD Subjects
The subjects were three groups of students, matched for socioeconomic status, age, and race, who attended three inner-city schools in Philadelphia. All subjects were 11 years old and from low socioeconomic families. Approx- imately 65% of all groups were black children. The groups were formed in the following fashion. First, a group of students, diagnosed as learning disabled (LD) according to Penn- sylvania Department of Education standards, were made available to the authors. These students' nonverbal intelligence levels, as measured by the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) (Brown, Sherbenou, & Dollar, 1982), ranged from 71 to 102 (K = 87.4). Students were at least two years below grade level in reading ability and were depressed in other aspects of academic achievement (measured by the Diagnostic Achievement Test [Newcomer & Curtis, 1984]). They attended a self-contained learning disabilities classroom; none of them had been in special education longer than two and a half years. The group included 16 males and 14 females, whose ages ranged from 11-1 to 11-10 (x= 11-7). A total of 30 learning disabled students participated in the study; scorable (legi- ble) writing was obtained from 27 students.
The second group of subjects, labeled reading disabled (RD), were selected from a list of youngsters who had been determined by the California Achievement Test (CAT) (school ad- ministered) and by teacher judgment to be
reading at least two years below grade level. All attended regular class but received special reading instruction from a remedial reading teacher. The nonverbal intelligence level of these 16 male and 16 female children ranged from 76 to 105 (-= 90.0) and their ages from 11-0 to 11-9 (-= 11-5). Scorable writing samples were obtained from 31 RD subjects.
Children in the third group were randomly selected from a list of age-appropriate can- didates. Test data regarding their intelligence levels were not available. However, according to CAT scores and teacher judgments, these children read on grade level and were typical of normal students. They evidenced no physical, sensory, motor, emotional, or cognitive prob- lems. The ages of these 19 females and 9 males ranged from 11-2 to 11-11 (x = 11-6). A total of 31 scorable writing samples were obtained; one was excluded because it was illegible.
Instrumentation and Procedure The Diagnostic Achievement Battery (DAB)
(Newcomer & Curtis, 1984) was used to measure writing samples. The DAB is a stand- ardized, nationally normed, individually ad- ministered test designed for use with children aged 6 through 14. It has highly acceptable reliability and validity coefficients. Although the test is designed to measure such aspects of writing as punctuation and capitalization skills, only its creative writing component was used in this study.
Each child was individually shown the tripar- tite picture series that illustrates the classic tor- toise and hare story in a racing setting. The first picture depicts a sleek, modern racing car and a battered VW beetle preparing to race. The sec- ond picture shows the racing car zooming ahead and the crowd laughing at the beetle. In the third picture the racing car has crashed and the beetle is chugging across the finish line. In addition to the story stimuli, each picture shows two people prominently in the foreground watching the race with great animation. The children were in- structed in accordance with the test directions which state,
Look at the three pictures below and make up a good story to go with them. Take about five minutes to think about your story. Be sure to write a complete story using all three pictures, the first as the beginning, the second as the middle, and the third as the ending. It is best
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to plan a whole story before you begin to write. You have 15 minutes. (DAB Student Worksheet, 1984)
Scoring Criteria Three types of scoring criteria were used to
evaluate the students' compositions: writing categories, measures of fluency, and measures of cohesion. Each will be discussed. Writing Categories
The first type of scoring criterion, writing categories, provides standards for evaluating the extent to which a writer has succeeded in com- posing a story. Four writing categories have been developed: story, story-like, descriptive, and ex- pressive. A definition of each writing category is presented below.
Story. Stories composed by immature writers lack many of the features of those by mature writers. Therefore, since the authors intended to work with immature writers, the definition of story in this study was adapted from Bremond's and Prince's definitions of a minimal or simple story. To be judged as a story, therefore, a com- position had to contain a setting, a conflict, and a resolution all related to one another. A simple story might include a setting introducing the two cars, a conflict over which car or car drivers would win the race, and a resolution in which the surprising winner was identified. Consider the following story by Jema (reading disabled).
Countdown time all people so silent you could hear a pin drop. First the red light, then the green. They're off! Number 12 is in the lead, 11 coming in the lead 11 has the lead. 12 is going too fast. There's no brakes in car 12. Boom. 12 is out of the race. 11 has the race now the finish line. Car 11 won the race Cheers all around. The driver steps out of the car so proud himself to even to touch the trophy. (spelling translated)
In this writing the setting is clearly the race: the conflict or complication is car 12 losing its brakes, while the resolution is car 11 winning the race. This child has developed a story schema and her writing meets the definition of a story.
Story-like. The story-like category was established for writing which was much like a story by identifying a setting, but which lacked either a complication or a resolution. Story-like compositions were missing one of the three essential elements of a minimal story-they were based on immature or incomplete story
schemas. Consider the following composition by Solomon (learning disabled).
The story is about a big race. Bob and Tom is the two men that you see in the story. They are the owner to the two car in the race. Bob is telling Tom about his car is going to win the race. Tom telled Bob that how your car is run- ning. You will not get no where with that to win the race. (spelling translated)
In this piece of writing, the setting is the race. The complication is Tom telling Bob his car is not running well enough to win. This complication is never resolved; there is no story ending, though the writing stops. The writing was categorized as story-like, since it lacked one of the three necessary components.
To illustrate further the distinction between story and story-like, consider the following piece of writing by Lisa (learning disabled). Her com- position was also story-like, including a setting and resolution but no complication.
Sam and Ted were holding a race. Ted pulled the flag down and the cars speeded down the raceway. Sam was counting the time on the race and at the finish the red blast buggy came in first place and the other car crashed over the hill. (spelling translated) Descriptive. The third category included
writing that described the three pictures without integrating them into a story. In some cases, the writers numbered the three components of their writing or wrote "In the first picture..." Consider James' writing (reading disabled).
1. The man and the woman are watch the car go through the snow in the winter. 2. Two car hit each other and they are argu- ing. 3. The cars ran into the bush and now they cannot go where they were going. (spelling translated)
A second example is by Tienna (reading dis- abled):
The people standing here are laughing because the car in back of them hit the other car In the second picture they are laughing again because it is running off the road. They are laughing harder. On picture 3 they are not laughing. They is looking at somebody. (spelling translated)
In these examples each picture is independently described, and no story schema is evident. At best, a setting is described, but neither a com-
170 Learning Disability Quarterly
plication nor a related resolution is presented. Note how James and Tienna both described the characters in the picture foreground and the pic- tured events of the race without relating them to each other.
Expressive. The final category, expressive, is derived from Britton's work. These compositions seemed to be inventories of thoughts about a topic-free associations that might appear in a journal or diary. There was no narrative or story line, and there seemed to be no concern for a reader. Though both the descriptive and ex- pressive categories lack a narrative story, they differ in that expressive writing does not seem related even to the visual elements of the pic- tures in the task. Consider Ronda's (reading disabled) story.
Big Race today, I'm going to the big race to- day. Are you going too? I'm going to take my sister and brother. Are you going to take your sister brother too? Well are you? If you're not I will take Tammy with me. We are going to have a lot of fun too. (spelling translated)
Ronda wrote a conversation about attending a race. The elements of a story are not present, though the conversation could be part of a story. There is no evidence that the writer incorporated the content of the pictures beyond the setting of a race and the words on the banner in the pic- ture. Fluency
In addition to being sorted into categories on the basis of story criteria, the compositions also were evaluated on a second criterion-measures of fluency. Fluency may not relate specifically to children's story schema; however, it influences their ability to demonstrate schema possession. Although children understand the schema of a story, they may lack the linguistic and mechanical abilities to convey their thoughts on paper.
Fluency was defined as the capacity to generate words and phrases and was measured in two ways. One measure, length of the writing, was obtained by counting the number of words in the passage. The second, T-unit length, is a measure of syntactic fluency in writing. T-unit length is obtained by averaging the number of words in each independent clause with all its modifiers. For example, the sentence, "the man had a new car and he was eager to drive it," con- tains two T-units, the first consisting of six words,
the second of seven words (x =6.5). T-unit length tends to increase with the writer's age (Hunt, 1970; Loban, 1976) and decrease with the rhetorical difficulty of the writing task (Maimon & Nodine, 1978). Cohesion
The third type of scoring criterion, cohesion, was derived from Johnson-Laird (1983). Three levels of cohesion were determined: incoherent, confusing, and unclear referent. Incoherent writing, the most serious cohesion problem, oc- curred when events in compositions were unrelated, or when inexplicable events took place. Causal or intentional links were implausi- ble. The example of James' writing illustrates in- coherent writing: There is no logical relationship between a car in the snow, cars hitting each other, cars running into the bush, and the cars' inability to reach some apparent destination. A second example of incoherent writing is found in the work of Tuesday (learning disabled).
Today there was a big race and everybody was happy. Then the guy with the black and white his name was sam He said on your mark, get set, go. Then the race began! Everybody was happy. Speaking about peo- ple was yelling. It can bust your ear drums. Then BANG!!! Everybody is dead. Who done the to these poor people. (spelling translated)
This composition contains events that seem unrelated to one another as elements in a story plot. The transition from yelling to damage to the eardrum is understandable, but the next events-the people (presumably the race spec- tators) being dead, and their death caused by a person (who?) -seem unrelated to the race. The inferences a reader would have to make to create cohesion are unreasonable.
The writing categorized as confusing con- tained sequences of events in which the tem- poral or spatial relationships did not make sense. Writing that was confusing caused the reader less severe comprehension problems than the in- coherent writing. Consider this example by Frank (learning disabled):
The little car was riding up and down the track when this man asked him to race with the junk box car against that nice car. No way. How about $5.00 all right. and the little was going to go over line when he went put put but he still won. (spelling translated)
Frank does not make clear where, when, or how
Volume 8, Summer 1985 171
the man spoke to the driver of the little car. It is not clear that the junk box car and the little car are the same car, nor why the man should bet on the junk box car. A second example was written by Donald (reading disabled).
One day in March there was a drag race. One of my friends were in the race and so was I. it was a fun race. Mark was winning but me and my friend come up and passed him Me and my friend was neck and neck. We were almost at the finish line. But another car came up. The crowd was shouting They were shout out loud and mean loud. We were up to the line and we won you should have heard them they were running after us. (spelling translated)
In this confusing story the reader cannot be cer- tain of a number of points. Is the main character driving alone or with his friend? Sentences 2 and 4 suggest opposite interpretations about who were the drivers. Where did the other car come from? We do not know who won the race, though it seems important to the story. It is also difficult to understand what and why the crowd was yelling at the drivers and why they were chasing them.
Compositions were judged to have unclear referents when pronominalizations (relating to or constituting a pronoun) or anaphoric references (referring to a preceding word or group of words) were not specific or accurate. An unclear
referent made a story difficult to follow because the reader did not know which words were being referred to, though the writer obviously intended some referent. The reader was unsure which car or which one of two people did something, because the race cars were referred to only as the car or the other car. The following is an ex- ample written by D.K. (learning disabled):
The race is about to start. The race is on and the car is going and the car bent the other car. That car had cracked over and the other car is going off of gas. But that car had win the race. (spelling translated)
The lack of cohesion in this story only relates to which car is which. Otherwise, the reader is reasonably certain that there are two cars and what took place during the race.
Scoring the Writing The compositions were scored independently
by two authors. First they were evaluated on the four story categories: story, story-like, descrip- tive, and expressive. Then indicators of fluency and cohesion were appraised. Interrater reliabili- ty was established by having the third author read a randomly selected sample of the com- positions. Reliability coefficients were .81 for writing category and .87 for types of cohesion problems.
Treatment of Data The data were analyzed by the following pro-
cedures. First, differences among the groups'
Table 1 Number and Percent of Each Story Category per Group
Story Story-Like Descriptive Expressive Total Group n % n % n % n % n %
Learning 8 30 6 22 10 37 3 11 27 100 Disabled
Reading 15 47 8 25 7 22 2 6 32 100 Disabled Normal 22 71 6 19 3 10 -- -- 31 100
Total 45 50 20 22 20 22 5 6 90 100
172 Learning Disability Quarterly
Table 2 Average TONI Scores for Disabled Group and Writing Category
Group Story Story-Like Descriptive Expressive Mean
Learning 91.5 81.3 78.3 84.7 83.9 Disabled
Reading 89.9 80.8 81.6 85.5 84.4 Disabled Mean 90.7 81.0 79.9 85.1
ability to write stories were investigated using the chi-square statistic. Second, the relationship be- tween intelligence and composition skills was ex- plored with ANOVA. Only the IQs of the learn- ing disabled and reading disabled children could be compared as no IQ data were available on the normal children. Third, the extent to which the groups differed on the fluency criteria (total number of words and average T-unit) was com- pared with ANOVA (2-way). Also considered was the relationship between the category of writing and the total number of words generated. Fourth, correlation coefficients among T-units, total number of words, and intelligence for the LD and RD groups were completed. Fifth, the extent to which the groups wrote coherent stories was investigated with the chi-square statistic.
RESULTS The first finding to be discussed concerns the
composition categories. Student groups differed significantly, X 2 (6) = 9.95, p = .03, in their ability to produce writing that could be classified as story, rather than story-like, descriptive, or expressive. Table 1 shows the percent of children per group who produced each type of writing. The composition of a story proved most difficult for the learning disabled pupils, easiest for the normal students. Thus, only 30% of the learning disabled produced writing classifiable as a story, compared to 47% of the reading dis- abled, and 71% of the normals. Clearly, the LD children were prone to generate less mature writing. Forty-eight percent of the learning disabled children produced descriptive or ex- pressive writing, contrasted with 25% of the
Table 3 Mean Story Length for Story Category and Group
Story Story-Like Descriptive Expressive Group No. words No. words No. words No. words Mean
Learning 61.0 81.3 34.1 32.3 54.4 Disabled
Reading 60.4 57.5 43.0 56.5 52.2 Disabled Normal 125.8 113.2 83.3 -- 104.4
Mean 99.5 86.5 62.9 42.0
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reading disabled and 10% of the normals. Second, the effect of intelligence upon
children's composition ability is shown in Table 2. Analysis of variance revealed a significant dif- ference
(F3.51 = 3.95, p > .01) in the IQs of
both learning disabled and reading disabled children who wrote compositions classified in dif- ferent categories. Inspection of the table shows that the children whose writings could be classified as stories had significantly higher IQs than did those who wrote other types of com- positions.
The third result of our study involves fluency measures. One measure of fluency was com- position length. Differences among and within groups in writing length are shown in Table 3. Significant differences among the groups, F(2.79) = 14.05, p = .001, were noted in the total number of words produced. Also, signifi- cant differences emerged in the number of words in each story category, F(3.79) = 2.82, p = .04. The interaction was not significant. The normal group with a mean of 104 words per composition produced more words in three of four writing categories (they wrote no expressive compositions) than either of the disabled groups who had almost identical means (52-54 words). The shortest composition in the normal group was 36 words; the learning disabled and reading disabled each wrote 6 compositions with fewer words. Twenty of the 31 normal subjects wrote compositions exceeding 100 words; not one learning disabled child and only one reading
disabled child wrote 100 words or more. Con- sidering all three groups, the greatest number of words was generated in stories (x = 99.5), followed closely by story-like compositions (x =
86.5), and descriptive (x = 62.9) and ex- pressive (x = 42.0) writing. This continuum of results for the total subject population was true only for the normal subjects, however. The stories of both the learning disabled and the reading disabled subjects did not contain significantly more words than these children used in other types of compositions.
The other fluency criterion presented in Table 4, T-unit length, was affected minimally by group or by writing category variable. No signifi- cant differences were found among the groups, F(2.79) = .54, nor among the writing categories, F(3.79)= .99, in T-unit length.
The fourth result involved the correlations among the fluency criteria and intelligence. Neither fluency measure was affected by the in- telligence scores (r = .096 for story length, r =
.104 for T-unit). In addition, the two measures of fluency were not related to one another (r =
.147). Finally, the results pertaining to the scoring for
cohesion are presented in Table 5. Though the groups appear to differ somewhat in number of cohesion problems, a chi-square of in- dependence did not reach significance (X2 = 7.81, p = .25. Thus, we cannot claim that the pattern of cohesion problems varies from one group to another. Nonetheless, compared to the
Table 4 Mean T-Unit Length for Story Category and Group
Story Story-Like Descriptive Expressive Mean
Group wrd/T-unit wrd / T-unit wrd/T-unit wrd/T-unit
Learning 7.7 9.8 6.6 7.1 7.8 Disabled
Reading 8.3 9.5 7.6 8.1 8.4 Disabled Normal 8.2 8.0 9.6 -- 8.6
Mean 8.1 9.1 8.0 7.5
174 Learning Disability Quarterly
Table 5 Number and Percent in Each Group Whose Writing Is Incoherent, Confusing, or Has Unclear Referent
Unclear Incoherent Confusing Referent Total
Group n % n % n % %
Learning 5 18.5 4 15 3 11 44.5 Disabled
Reading 2 6 6 19 3 9 34 Disabled Normal -- -- 4 13 4 13 26
other groups, the learning disabled students tended to demonstrate more compositions with cohesion problems (44.5%). These children's cohesion problems were also the most serious, with 18.5% of their writing identified as in- coherent; in contrast, none of the normal sub- jects wrote incoherent compositions. Thirty-four percent of the reading disabled students had cohesion problems compared with 26% of the normals.
DISCUSSION An important implication of our findings is the
proposal of a hierarchy of the composition categories. A composition designated story is the most adequate response to the task. Story-like is a failed story; it is proposed to be the next most adequate response to the task. Although failing to meet the criteria of a story, descriptive writing represents an attempt to adhere to the content of the picture series. The least adequate response to the task is expressive writing, though in many cases, it is delightful to read. Here the children neither composed a story nor described the pic- ture content. Our argument that the four categories represent a hierarchy of increasingly immature responses to the task is based on the normal children's performance. Most of them wrote simple stories; some composed fairly com- plex multi-episodic stories, but our scoring criteria were not designed to differentiate these gradations within the story category. A small
number of children wrote story-like composi- tions; few composed descriptive pieces. No nor- mal child wrote an expressive composition in response to a task that required a story.
An additional and related interpretation of these results is that most normally achieving 11-year-olds have developed the concept of story schema, at least at the level necessary to meet the criteria for a simple story used in this study. In making this statement we recognize that researchers label components for a story dif- ferently and that many agree that a fully developed or mature story must include some form of the following elements:
- a setting which introduces the characters, the time, and place in the story; - an initiating event, which leaves the main character to formulate his/her major goal and starts the sequence of actions and events; - a goal, which represents the major desire of the main character; - a number of attempts, which are the characters' actions; - a series of outcomes, which are events or states produced by characters' actions; - internal responses, which are the subgoals, thoughts, or feelings of a character leading to his/her actions. Since story schema is developmental (Mc-
Conaughy, 1982), we did not expect immature writers to include all these components. We sug- gest that an investigation of the composition
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skills of older children, both disabled and nor- mal, will provide additional information about children's ability to use more complex story schemata when composing.
This study also offers evidence that children. with learning disabilities and, to a lesser extent, those with reading disabilities have more difficul- ty producing a story than do their normal peers. Almost half of the learning disabled group were unable to generate written compositions that ex- ceeded simple levels of picture description or idiosyncratic responses unrelated to the pictured scenes. Another 22% of the learning disabled children had an idea of how to write a story, but were unable to include all three basic com- ponents of a minimal story. Based on these data one may speculate that the learning disabled children, particularly those operating at the descriptive and expressive levels, lack the understanding of story schema that, according to many theorists, is essential not only to writing stories but to reading them with comprehension. Another interpretation is that the task of com- posing is so complex that a multitude of factors including story schema, awareness of audience, manipulation of words and sentences, and matching the story to the pictures caused cognitive overload. It is plausible to assume that learning disabled students might be more easily overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of the task than the other groups and, therefore, might not only use story schema less adequately, but also encounter more problems with some of the other features of the task.
The role of intelligence in the present task is difficult to assess. Since the reading disabled and learning disabled groups did not differ in nonver- bal intelligence, we cannot attribute the dif- ferences between the two groups to intelligence. For the normal children, we have no IQ test data; however, the achievement test results sug- gest that this group of children have average ability. As a result, we must at least consider the possibility that one reason why the normal children wrote better compositions than their disabled peers was that they were more in- telligent. Among the disabled groups, significant differences were noted in the intelligence levels of the children writing various types of composi- tions. This finding and the fact that the most in- telligent of the reading disabled and learning disabled students wrote stories lends some
credence to the importance of intelligence and supports our conclusion that story writing is the most mature response to the writing task.
As pointed out previously, fluency, the easy flow of words, is evidenced in both length of story and length of T-unit. We expected ability grouping of the writers to affect fluency, that is, normal students would be more fluent, and that composition skill and fluency would be related, that is, children writing stories would be more fluent. To some extent, our expectations were met. The normal students who produced stories wrote more words than their normal peers who wrote non-stories. They also wrote twice as many words as their disabled counterparts. On the other hand, even the normal children who did not write stories generated many more words than did their handicapped peers (note the descriptive category in Table 3). Among the handicapped students, the relationship between story composing and fluency is more obscure. The LD students who wrote stories or story-like compositions tended to use more words than those who wrote descriptive and expressive compositions; this was not the case for the RD students, however.
If we apply these data to any of three premises that can explain the relationship between story schema and fluency, our results are clarified. First, consider the premise that the inadequate composers who produced non-stories may generate fewer words than good composers, but that the abilities may be relatively independent of each other, that is, the children lack both fluency and story schema. According to the second premise, the lack of a story schema hampers the inadequate composers' ability to generate words and sentences, while the third premise suggests that the subjects' inability to generate words hampers their ability to convey their knowledge of story schema. The first premise is supported by the finding that the learning disabled students did not produce fewer words than the reading disabled students although the former experi- enced considerably more difficulty generating stories and story-like compositions. Also supporting the first premise is the finding that normal producers of non-stories consistently produced more words than did handicapped story writers. Finally, the reading disabled story producers of stories did not use more words than the reading disabled students who wrote other
176 Learning Disability Quarterly
types of compositions. If the second premise were correct, the learning disabled children should have been less fluent than the reading disabled. If the third premise were correct, the reading disabled should have produced no more stories and story-like compositions than their learning disabled peers.
To some extent, the results obtained using the second measure of fluency, T-unit length, may support the relative independence of story schema and fluency. Thus, T-unit length did not discriminate among the groups in this study. Nor did the type of writing appear to result in signifi- cant differences in T-unit length. The low cor- relation between story length and T-unit length suggests that these two variables are unrelated aspects of the composing process. Since other research has shown that the number of words produced increases with the writer's age and decreases with the rhetorical complexity of the task, the disparity of results requires some ex- planation. Though T-unit has been used exten- sively as a measure of the writer's increasing skill in manipulating syntax, no consistent pattern of growth or of the variables that influence that growth can be traced. Instead, most research has focused on changes that take place in students' writing as a function of instruction in composition classes. Some researchers have suggested that a growth spurt in syntactic development occurs in junior-high school (Crowhurst & Piche, 1979; Loban, 1976). Task complexity, audience for the task, and mode of discourse all effect T-unit length. Crowhurst and Piche (1979) found that for narration of an original story there was no dif- ference between sixth and tenth graders, though there were differences for other modes of discourse. Because of the strong task effect on T-units, the actual values cannot be compared across studies. As a result, we conclude that either T-unit is an unstable measure, or other characteristics of the task and the writer's ability to complete the task are much more potent determinants of the syntactic structure of young writers' sentences.
An investigation of cohesion in writing also yields some interesting data. Writing a story that can be understood by a reader is a difficult task. Arguing that a story can be defined solely on the basis of referential continuity and plausibility, Johnson-Laird (1983) suggested that the plausibility criterion makes reasonable demands
on the reader in terms of inferring the meaning of the text. However, when the reader can find no plausible explanation for how the content of one sentence is related to that of another, the text fails to have meaning. In contrast, text with meaning for a reader requires inferences that, according to Johnson-Laird, fall within a tem- poral, spatial, causal, or intentional framework. That is, a story lacking plausibility requires un- founded or unimaginable inferences.
We examined the writings for evidence that a reader's understanding or inferences were strained. As readers of stories lacking cohesion, we were unable to make sense of the story events or sequence. Children showing clear awareness of potential reader confusion gave names to the cars or other characters. Occa- sionally, the writer numbered the cars on the pic- ture to remove any doubt about reference. In some cases, we know that the writer herself was confused as revealed through internal incon- sistency. For example, one child made a mistake between the cars numbered in the picture and the story of who won the race. Naming or numbering to make reference easy may have been carried out as much to benefit the writer as the reader. The learning disabled writers had the greatest difficulty, the reading disabled the next most difficulty - further evidence of the cognitive overload suffered by the handicapped writers in this complex task. Summary
This study provides answers to two questions. What are the characteristics of the compositions written by normal students and disabled learners? How do disabled students compare with normal students on this type of task? Our results show a hierarchy of adequacy of com- positions, indicating that most normal children possessed an understanding of a story schema that they used in their compositions. Many disabled readers and learners lacked such an understanding, however. Some children pro- duced compositions that lacked cohesion and exemplified expressive writing, indicating that they differed in their ability to anticipate the reader's perspective by writing in a manner from which the reader could readily draw inferences or understand. In addition, children showed a wide range of fluency in the words and phrases they produced. Some of their stories were im- poverished, consisting of approximately a dozen
Volume 8, Summer 1985 177
words, whereas others were complex composi- tions containing 200 words. Such differences in the types of compositions produced are at- tributable in part to reading and learning disabilities, in part, to differences in intelligence. Implications for Teaching
We are unsure how and under what condi- tions children develop the concept of story schema. We know that the adequacy of children's story schema varies and that han- dicapped students demonstrate less knowledge in this area than normal students. We suspect that exposing children to well-formed stories helps them develop story schema. Bruce (1978) analyzed the success of a story in terms of shared assumptions and beliefs between reader and writer. Poor readers misunderstand stories because of a gap between their knowledge and the writer's knowledge. Teachers can help children overcome this gap by having them read and discuss canonical stories, by asking them questions such as, how do you think the story will end, or by asking them to predict future events as they read. Teachers must expose children to a variety of stories.
In addition, to develop story schema children must be encouraged to compose both oral and written stories. Barenbaum (1973) suggested that teachers can make children aware of the reader for whom a story is being composed by conferring with them and helping them revise their compositions. Children having difficulty constructing stories should be encouraged to draw a picture before they begin writing. Research conducted by Temple et al. (1982) and Grinnell and Burris (1983) has shown that drawing can serve a rehearsal function, helping to solidify a story as it is being composed. Final- ly, teachers should design writing assignments carefully. While offering creative options for stories, use of fanciful settings to stimulate writing may be too challenging for handicapped students. For example, an assignment to write a story about the adventures of an earthling in outer space requires children to shift en- vironments and makes assumptions about their knowledge of outer space. Such a task requires creativity and imagination in addition to the complex skills of story-making. Teachers must strive to establish an appropriate level of com- plexity for their students or risk frustrating them unnecessarily.
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Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Barenbaum, E. (1983). Writing in the special class.
Topics in Learning & Learning Disabilities, 3, 12-20.
Britton, J.F. (1970). Language and learning. Har- mondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
Brown, L., Sherbenou, R.J., & Dollar, S. (1982). Test of nonverbal intelligence. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Bruce, B. (1978). What makes a good story? Lan- guage Arts, 55, 460-466.
Crowhurst, M., & Piche, G.L. (1979). Audience and mode of discourse effects on syntactic complexity in writing at two grade levels. Research in the Teaching of English, 13, 101-109.
Grinnell, P.C., & Burris, N.A. (1983). Drawing and writing: The emerging graphic communication pro- cess. Topics in Learning & Learning Disabilities, 3, 21-32.
Hunt, K.W. (1970). Syntactic maturity in school children and adults. Monographs of the society for research in child development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983). The coherence of dis- course. Mental models: Towards a cognitive science
of language, inference, and consciousness. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loban, W. (1976). Language development:
Kindergarten through grade twelve. Research
report no. 18. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Maimon, E.P., & Nodine, B.F. (1978). Measuring syntactic growth: Errors and expectations in sentence-combining practice with college freshmen. Research in the Teaching of English, 12, 232-244.
Mandler, J.M. (1984). Stories, scripts, and scenes:
Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
McConaughy, S.H. (1980). Using story structure in the classroom. Language Arts, 57, 157-165.
McConaughy, S.H. (1982). Developmental changes in story comprehension and levels of questioning. Language Arts, 59, 580-589.
Newcomer, P.L., & Curtis, D. (1984). Diagnostic achievement battery. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Poulsen, D., Kintsch, E., Kintsch, W., & Premack, D. (1979). Children's comprehension and memory for stories. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 28, 379-403.
Prince, G. (1973). A grammar of stories. The Hague: Mouton.
Stein, N.L., & Glenn, C.G. (1982). Children's con- cept of time: The development of a story schema. In W. Friedman (Ed.), The developmental psychology of time. New York: Academic Press.
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Stein, N.L., & Policastro, M. (1984). The concept of a story: A comparison between children's and teachers' viewpoints. In H. Mandl, N.L. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.), Learning and comprehension of text (pp. 113-155). Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex.
Temple, C.A., Nathan, R.G., & Burris, N.A. (1982). The beginnings of writing, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Whaley, J.F. (1981a). Readers' expectations for story structure. Reading Research Quarterly, 17, 90-114.
Whaley, J.F. (1981b). Story grammars and reading instruction. The Reading Teacher, 17, 762-771.
Requests for reprints should be addressed to: Barbara F. Nodine, Department of Psychology, Beaver Col- lege, Glenside, PA 19038.
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Article Contents
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Front Matter [pp. 161 - 181]
1984-1985 President's Message: Council for Learning Disabilities: The Year in Review [pp. 162 - 165]
Story Composition by Learning Disabled, Reading Disabled, and Normal Children [pp. 167 - 179]
Early-Screening Programs: When Is Predictive Accuracy Sufficient? [pp. 182 - 188]
Social Status of Learning Disabled Children and Adolescents: A Review [pp. 189 - 204]
Learning Disabled Students' Spontaneous Use of Test-Taking Skills on Reading Achievement Tests [pp. 205 - 210]
Characteristics of LD Students in Iowa: An Empirical Investigation [pp. 211 - 220]
Strategy Transformation in Learning Disabled and Nondisabled Students [pp. 221 - 230]
Perspectives on the Education and Training of Learning Disabled Adults [pp. 231 - 236]
Software Review