Page 22 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

Literacy-Based Speech Language Therapy Activities

How does narrative development change as a child gets

older?

A natural increase in complexity is evident in different aspects of a story’s composition as a child gets

older. Clausal compliments expand from simple (They came.) to complex (We thought that they were
coming.). Stories transition from being egocentric (I liked it) to awareness of other characters’
thoughts (He was angry). Understanding of time is even relative to narrative development as a child
moves from present-tense stories to working in the past. The majority of the research that we have

available to us provides an explanation of narrative development in English. If narratives develop
differently among different cultural and language groups, then criteria that have been developed for

English may not be accurate for evaluating the non-mainstream population.

How can differences in narrative ability affect academic

performance?

Spanish-speaking children continue to perform more poorly than other children on national
indicators of achievement. The disparity between success rates of cultural groups may be the result

of the testing criteria and not indicative of the Spanish-speaking population’s intelligence or ability.
The tests include identifying facts from written passages, making inferences from passages, searching
for specific information from a passage, and meshing ideas (Gutierrez-Clellen, 2002). It is expected

that a child use the text and his or her own world knowledge in order to answer the questions. When
a child’s personal knowledge differs from that of mainstream America, it can only be expected that a
discourse, story recount, or story telling will not match the standards currently used in assessing

narrative ability. As a result, that student’s narrative abilities might be underestimated.

How can a story narrative be useful for intervention?

Children use story telling as a way to interact and share information about what is going on in their
daily lives. These stories are a quick snapshot of overall linguistic ability. The understanding of what
goes into a story and the ability to tell a story require phonological, morphological, syntactic,

semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. Additionally, having a child tell a story provides the clinician
with an uninterrupted flow of discourse from a child, thereby avoiding certain artificialities of data
from conventional elicitation (Klecan-Aker and Colson, 2009).

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