Page 115 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

Literacy Based Intervention Templates

Multi-Part Story-Telling

At what point do we dismiss students from Special Education? Or, if I asked you to define what a
robust story was, what would it include?

Let's start by defining what a ROBUST is:

 It is minimally a 4-part story
 Each “part” is content-rich containing “who, what, where, and when” information
 It is in the right sequence/order
 It uses cohesive elements (first, then, after, at the end)
 It uses long, grammatically-rich sentences.

If you are doing the math, that is 16 pieces:

Four “WH” question content pieces X four parts. There are also
four cohesive elements (first, then, after, at the end) but those

sometimes define the “when” content.

How satisfied would you be, and would your teachers be, if your
students were producing 16-part narratives that included all major
content pieces, in the right order? Let’s walk through how to use

this four-part graphic organizer to get us there.

Discourse in Speech Therapy

First, the heavy stuff:
As a clinical tool, discourse analysis has great potential for deferentially diagnosing a variety of clinical
populations and making predictions about the impact of language disorders on communication in

real-life situations. Hatch (1992) asserts that narrative discourse is the most universal discourse
genre, as all cultures have storytelling traditions. Ulatowska and colleagues have documented that

personal narratives relating a “frightening experience” tend to result in dramatic and lengthy
discourse in Caucasian and African-American subjects (Ulatowska and Olness, 2001).

Now, the fun stuff:
If we take our professorial bow-tie off, what we are really saying is that we are looking for a way to
get a child to INDEPENDENTLY combine all the small parts of language into something big and
pretty.

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