About Narratives
Narratives are my favorite way to approach therapy goals for many of the learners I work with. You can use narrative-based activities to address foundational language skills (Sounds , Words, and Sentences), as well as story comprehension and storytelling skills.
Plus, not only do we share stories with others, we can think in story!
Narratives tend to elicit more complex language when compared to other conversational tasks (Nippold et al., 2014) which make them great for targeting more advanced language skills.
There are two main ways of measuring narrative and retell skills: macrostructure (overall organization and coherence) and microstructure (word/sentence level language complexity).
Ways to assess macrostructure, organization, and coherence are measuring story sequencing skills, the use of story elements, using story rubrics to measure quality of a story, and assessing the use of story structure when writing/telling parallel stories.
Some ways to assess microstructure include type-token ratio, number of different words, mean length of utterance, and total number of utterances (e.g., during a story retell task).
Individual students may show relative strengths in different macrostructure or microstructure skills, so it’s important to look at both areas in order to provide the most effective, individualized intervention as possible.
Based on the Common Core Standards, by kindergarten, children should be able to tell a story in time order (Sequencing). By 2nd grade, they should be able to give details of actions, thoughts, and feelings (Story Elements). And by 4th grade, they should be retelling stories with increased detail and complexity (Story Retell) (Petersen et al, 2014).
Read on to learn more about targeting narrative skills with our learners. ⬇️
Top Narrative Resources
Here are my favorite resources that target narrative skills for speech therapy:
Targeted Teaching of Narrative Skills
Like we do with foundational language skills, we want to directly teach narratives by breaking them down into their component parts and teaching each skill directly. One effective way to do this is by directly teaching story grammar elements/parts. We also want to scaffold success by gradually increasing the length and complexity of the targeted narrative task.
Looking through a story grammar based lens, children’s narratives develop through these steps or levels (Westby, 2012):
- Descriptive Sequence (before 4 years): The child describes actions, scenes, or characters. (To Work On: Target early WH Questions like ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘who’ and Sentence Formulation)
- Action Sequence (before 4 years): The child describes a temporal sequence of actions or events. (To Work On: Target Sequencing skills)
- Reactive Sequence (about 4–5 years): The child indicates causality between events through terms such as because and so. (To Work On: Target advanced WH Questions like ‘why’ and ‘how’ and the use of conjunctions in Sequencing and Sentence Combining tasks)
- Abbreviated/Incomplete Episode (about 6–7 years): The child refers to the goal of the main character but does not yet explain a plan or how the goal is achieved. (To Work On: Target increased understanding and use of Story Elements elements)
- Complete Episode (about 8–9 years): The child refers to an initiating event, a goal, an attempt to achieve the goal, and how the goal was or was not achieved. (To Work On: Expand Story Elements knowledge and Story Retell skills)
- Elaborated Episodes (9+ years): Stories with obstacles to attempts, multiple sequential episodes, or embedded episodes (To Work On: Increase story complexity and independent storytelling skills by targeting Story Generation with faded supports)
Note: You might also see these stages called Heap Stories, Sequence Stories, Primitive Narratives, Chain Narratives, and True Narratives. While the names are different, they describe similar steps of narrative development.
If we look closer at specific language milestones and skills, by the end of their elementary years, students should be producing complex, detailed narratives that include mental state verbs (ex: think, feel, know, imagine), temporal adverbs (ex: first, next, later, last), subordinating and coordinating conjunctions (ex: and, since, until), complex sentences (including causal links between events), and well-developed story elements (ex: character, setting, problem).
Using Stories in Therapy
Narratives are both engaging and functional.
You can use narratives to directly target narrative skills, but you can also use narratives to target other language and communication skills.
Books and stories provide a perfect medium or context to practice a variety of skills all at the same time (which can be a lifesaver for group-based therapy, like many SLPs do in the schools).
Here’s the Story System I developed in order to target language skills using a contextualized, narrative-based unit centered around wordless picture books:
- Introduction (look at the pictures and predict what the story might be about, fill out a K/W/L chart, rate your knowledge on the topic/theme, and/or watch a short video related to the topic/theme of the story to build background knowledge)
- Preview (review relevant vocabulary Words they will hear, review Story Elements parts)
- Read the Story (use dialogic reading principles to keep engagement high)
- Macrostructure (discuss the story structure and Story Elements parts you noticed)
- Vocabulary + Syntax (directly teach these skills using activities like Describing, Defining, and Sentence Formulation with words, items, and sentences directly from the story)
- Comprehension + Retell (discuss the story, ask comprehension questions, practice and scaffold Story Retell skills)
- Writing (write your own version of the story, about a related topic, or a parallel story that follows the same story structure)
You can see how my Story System contextualizes many skills, including vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension skills. And it can be easily adapted and used with any story or text!
My top tip? Reread the story often, at least 2-3 times throughout the story unit.
And if your students would benefit from phonological awareness activities, I’d recommend starting the session with ~5 minute practice using words from the story.
If you want robust, contextualized narrative units using the Story System made just for speech therapy sessions, check out my story units!
Each one contains an original, wordless picture book (written by me!) and tons of activities and ideas for using it with a variety of students to target a variety of goals.
My story units make it easy to follow the steps above with minimal prep. I know you’ll love them ❤️
