Story Composition by Learning Disabled, Reading Disabled
13
STORY COMPOSITION BY LEARNING DISABLED, READING DISABLED, AND NORMAL 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 Brittonand his colleagues (1970) have studied written language extensively. They classify compositions on a continuum where the most basic or primitivewriting 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'sinterests 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 Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Learning Disability Quarterly www.jstor.org ®
Story Composition by Learning Disabled, Reading Disabled
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
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve, and extend access to
Learning Disability Quarterly www.jstor.org
®
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
Volume 8, Summer 1985 169
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
Volume 8, Summer 1985 173
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
Volume 8, Summer 1985 175
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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story.
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Brown, L., Sherbenou, R.J., & Dollar, S. (1982). Test of
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Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983). The coherence of dis- course. Mental
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development:
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Mandler, J.M. (1984). Stories, scripts, and scenes:
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McConaughy, S.H. (1980). Using story structure in the classroom.
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McConaughy, S.H. (1982). Developmental changes in story
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19038.
Volume 8, Summer 1985 179
Article Contents
p. 167
p. 168
p. 169
p. 170
p. 171
p. 172
p. 173
p. 174
p. 175
p. 176
p. 177
p. 178
p. 179
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