Early

Looking for narrative structure in varied places will yield you many TOOLs! This includes sources such as games, current events, interactive websites, and of course, videos. In this post I want to expand upon the great work of Dr. Anna Vagin, who several years ago co-presented a webinar with Maryellen Moreau on the power of using animations for social and language learning (still available for free here). A quote from this webinar resonates strongly: Jerome Bruner (1986, 1996) referred to narrative thinking as a capacity to “read other minds”; “to make accurate inferences about the motives and intentions of others based on their observable behavior and the social situations in which they act. Narrative thinking is the very process we use to understand the social life around us,” take perspective and to construct situation models...

I have been serving an adjunct role at Boston University for 5 semesters providing supervision to graduate students in their first clinical experiences in the in-house clinic. One of the routines for the semester is to teach and use processes for obtaining baseline and post-treatment data. It was by equipping students in this manner that I discovered the availability of the CUBED, along with the previously mentioned SLAM Cards. The CUBED is a “family of screening and progress monitoring tools” that includes a huge package of graded story samples (levels K-8) with narrative language listening and reading materials and measures....

As many narratives could tell us (think of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as an extreme example), just because something “has always been done this way” does not mean it shouldn’t be questioned. This month we’ll turn that concept into thinking about standardized tests, too-long THE> determining factor in whether students do or do not receive speech and language interventions, particularly in the public school setting. Without inserting my POV too much into this topic, let’s keep the Summer Study Series focus and take a look at the recent review article published in Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, A Critical Analysis of Standardized Testing in Speech and Language Therapy (Nair, Farah & Cushing, 2023). The authors recount the history of speech and language intervention as dating back to the Middle Ages, with recognition of speech disabilities and efforts to remediate seen in cultures such as ancient India...

June has at this point busted out all over! I know I am wrapping up my school year work while many of you may have been lounging for a few weeks, I hope. For this month’s entry in our Summer Study Series we are diving into the strong connection between narrative language and social learning. But speaking of Summer Studies related to narrative and social development, don’t miss MindWing’s Summer Course: Social Communication with SGM^®: Social Emotional Learning, Language Processing, & Pragmatics—July 25 & 26, 2023! While from a few years back, this month’s article presents terrific and easy to implement ideas for the PK-primary school level. Let’s delve into “Using a narrative- and play-based activity to promote low-income preschoolers’ oral language, emergent literacy, and social competence” from the Early Childhood Research Quarterly (Nicolopoulou, Cortina Ilgaz, Brockmeyer Cates & de Sá, 2015)...

It’s great to have another resource due to the publication of this study, Investigating Narrative Performance in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (Winters, Jasso, Pustejovsky & Byrd, 2022). “Thus the story grammar model appears to be a valid representation of how individuals organize story information in order to encode, understand and retrieve stories.” The Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research is more technical than some publications, but I’ve provided some salient points below. One way this study differs from the previously discussed meta-analysis is that it focuses on assessment rather than intervention. Among its aims are looking at different narrative measures such as macrostructure, microstructure, and internal state language, and identifying which may have a better sensitivity in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD)...

from Google is a tool that was created “just in time” (in tech-talk) for the pandemic. Of course, these events thrust us into new ways of working with our students from a distance. Jamboard’s simple whiteboard features simplified remote, tech-based clinical interactions, such as solidifying ideas with pictures and making thinking visible with sticky notes. Jamboard was released in 2017 as a business-brainstorming tool and had started to make its way into educational circles more widely when the unthinkable happened: schools and clinical settings needed to shut down. Throughout the pandemic, it was an invaluable tool, one which I wrote about here in conjunction with the use of MindWing’s Digital Icons. But like some emergency practices, it has continued to be extremely useful. See the linked post above for some nitty-gritty how-tos on using Jamboard. In this post we are going to focus on a specific application of creating parallel stories. The practice of using picture books in speech-language and literacy interventions is well established, as it can provide a context for teaching narrative structure (with Story Grammar Marker^® of course) and microstructure such as syntax and vocabulary targets...