Strategies for Expanding Oral Language and Narrative Development

Narrative language skills present challenges for many children with social communication issues. A lack of narrative language skills can negatively affect academic success as well as social skill acquisition. In addition, a child unable to generate oral narratives most likely needs help with other language skills, including vocabulary, flexible language, abstract concepts and figurative language, perspective taking, nonverbal language, and executive function. In this blog post I share a number of strategies in the areas of story grammar, visual supports and vocabulary development to help improve oral narrative language skills in school-age children. And, during my session at ASHA Schools Connect in Baltimore later this month, I’ll present more practical ways to use books and structure sessions to maximize progress. In typical development, narrative production emerges between 2 and 3 years of age when children begin telling others about what they see and do. As they get older, they begin telling stories that occurred in the past. Narrative language development continues as children begin applying oral narrative skills to analyzing, retelling, summarizing and explaining increasingly complex written language text. Story grammar. One major aspect of narrative development involves story grammar. Story grammar acts as a cognitive map to guide comprehension and production of narratives. It also provides predictable episode structure enabling a child to process a story efficientl...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Events Private Practice Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Autism Spectrum Disorder Language Disorders social skils Source Type: blogs