Page 84 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

Literacy-Based Speech Language Therapy Activities

Example Narrative Summary

Three stories were elicited from Josepi. English without a model (example),
Spanish without a model, and Spanish with a model.
Josepi’s English language sample could be described as naming the characters and
using gestures and sound effects to tell the story. His Spanish language samples
were more linguistically rich and are considered a truer measure of his language
abilities. Josepi’s language sample in English was smaller, less complex, and
contained more grammatical errors. Some of the errors are typical of Spanish‐
influenced English but others were not, and are indicative of language impairment.
In Spanish, Josepi was asked to tell a story without a model and at a different time
tell a story with a model. There was considerable language growth between the two
language samples (tell and retell), which indicates that Josepi benefits greatly from
being able to see/hear an example before he is expected to complete a task.
Josepi produced utterances of 1‐6 words in Spanish. His utterances included the
characters of the story and some actions (sleeping). The story was told from the
perspective of the main character as Josepi spoke as though he were the boy. Much
of the story contained sound effects and naming of the characters. He mentioned
the place (in the water) on a few occasions but typically did not mention the place
or used non‐specific words (there/here). Without the pictures it would have been
difficult to understand what Josepi was talking about.
The story that he generated included verbs in present tense but did not include past
or future. He did use certain verbs (cayó/fell) that occur more routinely in the past
tense than the present. He did not use adjectives or many conjunctions (and).
Without the known context of the book, much of the story would have been difficult
to understand due to a lack of content, reduced use of pronouns and articles, and
reliance on carrier phrase such as “and…” While his story included the action of
many pictures, the story was not unified into a cohesive narrative. He did not use
cohesive elements (e.g. “and then”) to link the story together.
Grammatically, Josepi struggled to use complete sentences that were grammatically
and syntactically correct. He had difficulty including articles and pronouns
consistently. Additional syntactic errors included inclusion of extra articles, lack of
plurals, missing aux‐verb…, use of non‐informative naming (it, that, everywhere),
and using a different word order.

Can you think of another way to get information this rich?

This language sample gave us a wealth of information about Josepi’s expressive language skills and
insight into successful strategies for intervention and classroom support. More than anything, if

gives us an extremely detailed description of what to focus on in speech therapy and how to write
goals.

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