Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice

Abstract

Purpose Narrative interventions are a class of language interventions that involve the use of telling or retelling stories. Narrative intervention can be an efficient and versatile means of promoting a large array of academically and socially important language targets that improve children's access to general education curriculum and enhance their peer relations. The purpose of this tutorial is to supply foundational information about the importance of narratives and to offer recommendations about how to maximize the potential of narrative interventions in school-based clinical practice. Method Drawing from decades of cognitive and linguistic research, a tutorial on narratives and narrative language is presented first. Ten principles that support the design and implementation of narrative interventions are described. Results Clinicians can use narrative intervention to teach story grammar, complex language, vocabulary, inferencing, and social pragmatics. Storytelling, as an active intervention ingredient, promotes the comprehension and production of complex language. Conclusion When narrative intervention is implemented following a set of principles drawn from research and extensive clinical experience, speech-language pathologists can efficiently and effectively teach a broad set of academically and socially meaningful skills to diverse students.

Feasible and Effective Language Intervention Strategies that Accelerate Students' Academic Achievement

“…For students with language difficulties, there is a growing body of research suggesting that narrative intervention can quickly produce important gains in the production and comprehension of narrative structures that can be generalized to academic skills such as reading comprehension and writing. [56][57][58][59] A discussion of narrative intervention is beyond the scope of this article (see Spencer and Petersen 60 for a review); here, we recommend SLPs address narrative structures that align with the story grammar framework, 61 which undergirds the academic expectations in U.S. schools. 37 This framework includes several generally applicable elements, including character, setting, initiating event (or problem), emotion, attempt (or action), consequence, and resolution (or ending).…”

“…Discourse structure intervention in kindergarten should focus primarily on narrative, because a solid understanding of narrative structures and knowledge that discourse has patterns will support the more challenging task of learning expository discourse structures. 60 Nonetheless, young students should be exposed to exposition and learn to identify the main ideas and key details within spoken or written discourse. 37,62 Students with DLD may require intensive instruction and practice with expository structures to master the multiple purposes involved.…”

The Effect of Narrative Language Intervention on the Language Skills of Children With Hearing Loss

“…Narratives consist of story structure (or the story level grammar; Stein & Glenn, 1979) and the sentence level structures that reflect literate language through the inclusion of modifiers, causal and temporal markers, and subordinate and relative clauses (Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001;Westby, 2005). Interventions that promote narrative language (i.e., narrative language intervention; see T. D. Spencer & Petersen, 2020) may have a lasting impact on academic achievement considering early narrative language predicts later academic achievement (Faizo et al, 1996), specifically related to reading comprehension (Catts et al, 2002;Dickinson & McCabe, 2001). In primary grades, children are expected to demonstrate an understanding of narrative discourse-level tasks that are often extremely challenging for children with hearing loss, especially when the child was not provided immediate auditory access or appropriate early intervention (Moeller et al, 2010;Nittrouer & Lowenstein, 2015).…”

“…To produce strong narrative retells, a child must be able to attend to and comprehend a story heard or read. They have to understand the general structure of stories and how elements of the story are organized and connected to create the framework of the text (Gillam et al, 2009;T. D. Spencer & Petersen, 2020).…”

Developing Autobiographical Reasoning/Self-Identity

“…The focus of this intervention has typically been on developing comprehension and generation of fictional narratives. Many researchers and clinicians have developed strategies for teaching children to comprehend and generate the structure and content of fictional stories (Spencer & Petersen, 2020). There is, however, increasing evidence on the importance of developing students’ abilities to generate personal stories (McCabe et al, 2008; Westby & Culatta, 2016).…”