The effectiveness of discourse-based intervention on personal narrative of school-aged children with borderline intelligence quotient

Discourse-based interventions were studied less in speech therapy. This study aimed to investigate the effects of discourse-based intervention on language disabilities in school-aged children with borderline intelligence quotient (IQ). In an experimental study، 33 students at the age of 6-13 years with borderline intelligence quotient (17 students for intervention and 16 students for control group) were selected with available sampling. The intervention lasted 14 sessions (every session: 45 minutes) that focused on the structure and content of discourse. Personal narrative was elicited with explanation of the same topic (go to a trip) for pre- and post-test. Mean scores of intelligence quotient، age and education had no difference between the two groups. The intervention caused the increase of compound sentences (p=0. 038)، types of cohesive conjunctions (p=0. 003)، and related information (p=0. 008) and decrease of ungrammatical sentences (p=0. 031). Our findings indicate that participation in the intervention program has a clinically significant effect on the participants'' abilities to produce personal narrative.