SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts Oral Narrative • Develop an understanding of the sequence of oral narrative development. • Highlight the language components involved in producing an oral narrative. • Discuss the difficulties students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) experience when producing an oral narrative. • Provide practical strategies to help support oral narrative skills in the classroom. • An oral narrative is defined as the telling or retelling of real- life/personal experiences or fictional events. • Early interactions between children and adults allow for story telling skills to begin at an early age. • In these early stages children will tell stories by recounting personal experiences. • Increased exposure to storytelling in the home environment can positively influence a child’s narrative skills. • Parents who took the time to listen and extend upon their children’s stories resulted in better story telling skills. • Consistently switching topics and over correcting often saw children withdraw from wanting to share stories with their parents.
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Oral Narrative - Speech & Language Development Australia
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SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
Oral Narrative
• Develop an understanding of the sequence of oral narrative development.
• Highlight the language components involved in producing an oral narrative.
• Discuss the difficulties students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) experience when producing an oral narrative.
• Provide practical strategies to help support oral narrative skills in the classroom.
• An oral narrative is defined as the telling or retelling of real- life/personal experiences or fictional events.
• Early interactions between children and adults allow for story telling skills to begin at an early age.
• In these early stages children will tell stories by recounting personal experiences.
• Increased exposure to storytelling in the home environment can positively influence a child’s narrative skills.
• Parents who took the time to listen and extend upon their children’s stories resulted in better story telling skills.
• Consistently switching topics and over correcting often saw children withdraw from wanting to share stories with their parents.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• A child’s narrative development from the ages of 2-6 years can be represented by five key developmental stages.
• Stage 1: Heaps Stage (develops approx. 2 years of age).
• Collection of unrelated ideas
• Repetitive sentence structures with few linking words
• A well-formed story which includes a logical plot based on a central theme.
• The sequence of events builds to a problem before finally providing a resolution.
• Dialogue is often included for characters.
• Oral narrative ability can be broken down into two main modalities- comprehension and production.
• Children will need to have a good understanding of a narrative’s structure before they can then produce a spoken narrative.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• An oral narrative can be broken into macrostructure & microstructure
• Macrostructure is the overall organisation and coherence of a spoken narrative
• Macrostructure can be broken down into episodic structure and story grammar.
• Story grammar refers to specific sequenced components of the narrative.
• To complete a true fictional narrative a child must provide a story with a specific sequence.
• The story setting- This should include information relating to the time, characters and place.
• Initiating event- Multiple events can take place. Events should lead to a problem.
• Internal response- Responses made by characters in relation to the problem.
• Plan- A plan to resolve the problem.
• Attempt- Events which lead to a solution.
• Consequence- The outcome of the solution.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Reaction- The resolution.
• Ending- The final conclusion to the story.
• An episode is the inclusion of components from the initiating event to the reaction.
• A complete episode contains at least four components;
o Initiating event, o At least two of the following-
internal response, plan, attempt o Consequence.
• An incomplete episode occurs if one of the following is missing from the story;
o Initiating event o Attempt o Plan o Consequence
• A more complex narrative will contain multiple episodes.
• Children begin to produce narratives with multiple episodes at 7-8yrs.
• Children add to the complexity of their stories by expanding on episodes and making interactive episodes. This emerges at 11 years of age.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• The way in which episodes are linked together is also considered an important part of the narrative macrostructure.
• To allow for a flow between episodes children will need to have a good ability to use connectors.
• Specifically those that represent; time & cause.
• The microstructure of a story helps provide structure to sentences used throughout the story. This includes;
o Vocabulary (Semantics)- words used to describe characters, events and places.
o Syntax – producing sentences of increased length with appropriate word order and structure.
o Morphology – producing sentences with appropriate grammar.
• A story- teller will need to choose more complex vocabulary to describe images and display emotions.
• When emotive and descriptive vocabulary is used it allows the listener to receive the full experience without having been present for the event.
• Stories can be made more complex when further focus is placed on noun and verb phrases.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Verbs are an important part of storytelling as they lend themselves to being “upgraded”.
• Verbs can be classified according to tiers; o Tier 1- High Frequency o Tier 2- Abstract Words o Tier 3- Specialised low frequency
words
• Different types of verbs can influence the length of a sentence.
• Transitive Verbs: These verbs allow for the length of sentence to be extended and need to be associated with an object.
• Mental or cognitive verbs are transitive verbs. Cognitive verbs are an internal level of thought for example: planned, thought and loved.
• Intransitive Verbs: These verbs do not allow the length of a sentence to be extended as they do not need to take an object.
• Adverbs can also be used in stories to increase the length of verb phrases.
• When attempting to generate adverbs it is beneficial to ask questions that relate to the verb phrase.
• For example, “The man marched to the bus stop”.
o How? Quietly. o When? Later that day o Where? Smith street o Why? Because… o Frequency? Everyday
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Adjectives describe somebody or something.
• Co-ordinate adjectives can be re-arranged in a series.
• Co-ordinate adjectives are used to represent;
o Quality: great o Quantity: many o Size: big/large o Age: ancient o Shape: broad o Colour: pink o Origin: Australian o Material: smooth
• Research shows that children with developmental language disorder will more often;
o Depart from a true narrative o Include information that is scripted
or follows a listed format o Include unrelated information in
the middle of their story
• They may have difficulties at both a macrostructure & microstructure level
Macrostructure:
• Difficulties with organisation
• Omit elements of a story episode
• Omit detail in the major setting or minor setting
• Rely on picture supports to tell stories
Microstructure:
• Difficulty using cohesive words
• Fewer conjunctions
• Difficulty using pronouns
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Children must develop oral narratives skills before transferring these to literacy tasks.
• Children will be unable to write what they cannot say therefore any difficulties in oral narrative skills will impact written narration.
• Oral narratives allow children time to develop higher level language skills which influences their receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension skills.
• Oral narratives are important in allowing children to participate fully in a social context.
• Children will use personal narratives as a way to gain attention and initiate conversation with peers.
• If children have difficulties producing social narratives, they may find it challenging to engage in peer discussions, resolve social conflicts and overall establish a strong social connection with others.
• The next slides will discuss specific
strategies that can be used in the classroom to support oral narrative skills.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Visual supports can come in the form of pictography icons, symbols, gestures or manipulatives.
• Visual supports should be designed to highlight the specific components of a narrative.
• Colour coding can help students better understand different story parts and also aid in story comprehension.
• When introducing visuals icons, it is beneficial to teach each one in isolation and within the order they would generally occur in an oral narrative.
• Story icons and visual supports can also be used to aid a child’s understanding of narratives.
• Following a listening task, symbols and corresponding colour code can be introduced to help draw student’s to the part of the story which is associated with each question type.
• For children who are struggling to learn the structure or sequence of narratives they may benefit from going back to sequencing tasks with pictures.
• Students with language disorder may benefit from picture sequences to help reduce cognitive load.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Picture supports may also be beneficial for students struggling with idea generation.
• This may include whole picture scenes or wordless picture books.
• Pictures can be used with older students as a way to prompt initial idea or topic generation.
• Modelling is one way to help draw attention to the narrative structure
• Recasting involves saying the child’s incorrect production in the correct way
• Feedback should be immediate.
• Wh questioning is beneficial to help students recognise parts of the story that may be missing.
• Children need repetitive practice telling stories over a number of different contexts with various communication partners. (e.g., small groups and whole class story telling).
• It would also be beneficial to encourage parents to engage in similar tasks at home.
• Frequent practice in daily routines is an important step in allowing generalisation of oral narrative skills.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Provide opportunities for both story retells and story generation tasks.
• Allow students to listen to the target story multiple times before they are asked to retell the story.
• Research has shown that multiple exposures to the target story will increase a student’s performance and allow more complex and specific details to be included.
• Focus on teaching temporal and casual conjunctions
• Highlight and discuss different conjunctions used to link events.
• Explicitly teach conjunctions during story telling tasks.
• The use of word banks and cloze sentence tasks can be used to model conjunctions.
• Embed written narrative skills into oral narrative tasks.
• Some students may benefit from increased use of written sentences to remember a story
• Children with reading difficulties may benefit from story listening tasks.
• For these children the complexity of reading may take away from the enjoyment of learning about stories.
SCHOOL SUPPORT SERVICES Participant Handouts
• Placing students together in small groups or pairs can increase motivation
• Children may also be more willing to discuss personal experiences with friends in small group situations.
Marleen Westerveld Photo Bank - Personal Narratives. https://www.marleenwesterveld.com/resources/ Story retell tasks https://www.marleenwesterveld.com/storyretelltasks/ Reading Rockets Wordless Picture book list https://www.readingrockets.org/booklists/our-favorite-wordless-picture-books