Oral Narratives
Symptoms:
- Production of stories that are shorter, contain fewer descriptors, contain fewer details, and fewer “episodes” than those of peers.
- Requirement for a considerable amount of time to construct a story.
- Difficulty with organizational and sequential aspects of a story; lacks use of sequential and temporal terms (e.g., before, after, first, next).
- Difficulty sequencing pictures to tell a story.
Treatment:
A speech-language pathologist would work with a child to develop these critical skills which research has shown to be a predictor of school success. While narrative structures differ between cultures, the American culture incorporates a certain “story grammar,” or an organizational structure reliant on cause-effect relationships and a sequence of events. In therapy, students are exposed to well-structured narratives, explicitly taught “story grammar” elements, and are aided in comprehending and telling stories with the help of clinician scaffolding and the use of graphic organizers until they achieve independence. Older children work towards understanding temporal and causal relations, making inferences, understanding character responses and motivations, and producing more organized narratives with increasingly sophisticated language.
A speech-language pathologist would work with a child to develop these critical skills which research has shown to be a predictor of school success. While narrative structures differ between cultures, the American culture incorporates a certain “story grammar,” or an organizational structure reliant on cause-effect relationships and a sequence of events. In therapy, students are exposed to well-structured narratives, explicitly taught “story grammar” elements, and are aided in comprehending and telling stories with the help of clinician scaffolding and the use of graphic organizers until they achieve independence. Older children work towards understanding temporal and causal relations, making inferences, understanding character responses and motivations, and producing more organized narratives with increasingly sophisticated language.