The Effectiveness of Narrative Story-Telling as an Intervention Strategy to Improve the Narrative Speech of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) face difficulties in displaying appropriate verbal behavior during their daily social engagement. Narrative story-telling involves sharing of a story in a variety of ways and for different purposes to promote development of verbal behavior. A pretest-posttest experimental design was used to determine whether narrative story-telling as an intervention strategy is effective in developing narrative speech for children with ASD. The subjects received on lesson per week over six months. The results showed that there was an improvement in the mean scaled scores in the subjects’ stereotyped behavior, communication, social interaction and Autism Quotient on the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale (GARS); and slight improvement in the mean raw scores in their spoken language in terms of grammar, mean length of sentences uttered, picture recognition and word expression on the Renfrew Language Scales-Fourth Edition (RLS-IV) from pre-test to post-test. However, the subjects’ individual performance from the pre-tests to post-tests was influenced by the five subcategories of diagnosis under ASD.