Narrative Language Goals for Speech Therapy

Marisha (00:00)

Hey there, it's Marisha and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. We are continuing our series on goals and for the next several episodes, it'll be just me on the podcast and we are going to chat about some of my favorite areas to research and target in therapy. And today we are starting off with narratives. So before we dive into the types of goals that we might be writing when it comes to narratives. I wanna touch a little bit on why we might even write a goal to target narratives. So I'm going to share some research that I've come across over the years that kind of has boosted my rationale for targeting these goals. And we'll start off with...

There's lot of research showing that when students develop written and or oral narrative skills. It improves students ability to connect with peers and participate in and benefit from classroom activities, which is huge. That's what, especially if you're working in the schools, we have to document that we are helping students access their curriculum and participate in the classroom. So narratives are a really great thing to target and a way to kind of help students with that generalization and also just being able to help them access their curriculum. And there's a lot of research around teaching story grammar and how it's been found to improve comprehension.

There was a really cool study, it's a little bit older, but it was Gurney et al. 1990. But they worked with high schoolers who had learning disabilities and taught them, they taught them story grammar elements and they found that it even improved the comprehension of a social studies lecture. So that was really interesting to me that these targeting narratives and teaching these skills can have a really profound impact on students' ability to tell stories and connect with peers and participate in the classroom activities because so much of it is narrative-based throughout the day, whether it is in a more curriculum, like hard curriculum, versus connecting with peers. So yeah, that's part of why I love working on narratives. And there's also research that school-aged children with language disorders, if they present or if they demonstrate poor narrative skills, they're disadvantaged during a large portion of the school day because so much of that classroom instruction does incorporate at least some degree of narrative discourse, whether it's in how the teacher is presenting the lesson or how they're interacting.

It's just a really key part of that. And Gillam et al. 2018, go into that in a little bit more detail. So hopefully we're all on the same page now that it is worth our time to target narratives. We can get lot of bang for our buck by targeting these types of goals. It's very relevant to the curriculum and it can have a huge impact on our students, just quality of life in general too.

So in terms of kind of what we expect, I found this, like I think it's interesting to see like what we might see in our students versus other students in the general education classroom. So they have found that students with specific language impairment tend to produce narratives that have fewer total words. They use fewer different words. They have more syntactic errors. They have poorer use of cohesive devices like conjunctions and adverbials. They incorporate less story grammar. So these are the types of things that we might be looking at. So if we collect a language sample for a student's narrative generation or narrative retell, those are some of the types of things that we might see. And we have some normative resources that we can use to determine whether our students are on track or not. And I'll share some of those.

But it can also be helpful if we get into the habit of collecting language samples as part of the process for an IEP, for example, then we can get change over time. And that can give us some good indicators on whether students are, whether they would benefit from targeting narratives and having some goals around those different areas, or if they're progressing, how we would expect them to. But in terms of some of the narrative resources or normative resources. The test of narrative language is a formal assessment and it has norms because that's what formal assessments have. And so in the test of narrative language, students are asked to retell stories. They generate a story. They answer comprehension questions. And there's little rating scales for the narratives. There's a scoring rubric that can give us some data whether students are performing similar to similar age periods. And we of course want to consider the normative sample and all of that when we're analyzing those results and making sure it's appropriate for the student that we're working with. Some other options, if you're like, I'm not sure if this narrative is typical or not, or if it warrants intervention.

Some other norms that we can use are the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument, the ENNI. And I will add links and citations to all of these in the show notes. But you can access that at slpnow.com/195. And then the last formal normed assessment that I wanted to share was the CUBED narrative language measure.

This is by Peterson and Spencer. And again, I'll link to that in the show notes as well. So that can give you some data that you can pull from. And then we, of course, we won't just write a goal for narratives just because the students fall at a certain percentile or whatnot. We want to look at the impact in the classroom as well.

We'll be looking at teacher and parent report and work samples and classroom observations and all of those different pieces of data to really decide if this is an appropriate Avenue for goal writing for our particular students And there are like I mentioned the parent teacher report, classroom observations, work samples all of that. We can also collect informal language samples and analyze them for some of the things that I mentioned, like narratives, like how many total words, how many different words they're using, their syntactic errors, whether they're using cohesive devices, and whether they're including story grammar elements. Some other informal assessment tools are the dynamic assessment, the DYMOND by Peterson et al. is really great.

The school-age language assessment measures, the SLAM cards by Dr. Crowley are great too. And then there's the, we can use SALT to analyze our language samples too. And then there's the the MISL (Monitoring Indicators of Scholarly Language) by Gillam and Gillam. And again, I'll link to all of these, but these are just some extra resources that you can use in determining if this is a good goal area for your students.

And then as we will obviously be looking at the all of the assessment data, whether it's formal assessment, informal assessment, parent/teacher report, classroom observation, work samples, maybe we'll do little probes or whatnot, language samples. We'll look at all of those pieces of data to decide what types of goals we might want to write for students.

But I wanted to share just a handful of ideas to get us started. So we might write a goal for more related to comprehension. So maybe we could write a goal around answering questions about story grammar elements. So if I were creating a probe for this goal, which is how I like to do my progress monitoring, and I'll share linked to some other relevant episodes in the show notes as well. One article or one other episode that might be helpful is just how I structure my data collection because when we're writing goals, we want to think about how are we going to monitor progress and take data towards this goal. So that's something really helpful to think about. So I'll share a link to that episode and then I'll also share some other episodes that we've done related to narratives if you're wanting to dive in a little bit more because this is a super quick peek at some things that we might be thinking about and some goals, a quick overview of some goals that we could be writing. But we could have comprehension goal, answering questions about story grammar elements. like some common story grammar elements are character setting, problem, feelings, plan, et cetera, et cetera.

So we could ask for character, we would be asking like who was in the story setting, where did the story happen? When did it happen? And so we could develop a probe where we have a short reading passage and then answer, have some questions related to the targeted story grammar elements. And then we can get a baseline and see where students are starting and then measure their progress. And of course these goals that I'm listing off don't include all of the goal elements that are often required by school districts or that are elements of like smart goals. They are, especially for creating a probe and attaching it, the goals are specific. But we might want to also include like duration, accuracy, criteria, and level of support, the setting, and all of that kind of stuff too.

So these are just quick ideas and then hopefully you've got the skills to fill that out. I'll also link to a blog post about goal writing that goes into more detail there. So that's one goal, like comprehension, answering questions about story grammar elements. Another goal might be more of a narrative production goal where we're retelling a story, including X number of story grammar elements. And we would list the elements that we expect the student to include.

So whether it's character, setting, problems, feelings, plan, action, solution. So maybe we could say if those are the ones that we want them to include, that those, I just listed seven story grammar elements. If that's what we're considering, like our complete episode, then maybe we expect a realistic goal would be for them to retell a story, including five out of seven of those.

And that could be just a quick goal that we include. So that was story retell. We can also have a goal to generate a narrative, like a personal narrative, including however many story grammar elements. And then I think it would be helpful to list them out. And I'll put examples of these goals written out in the show notes as well.

Those are some basic goals, looking at comprehension of narratives, as well as the retell and generation. And we can look at the number of story grammar elements included. You can also create a rubric that looks at more than just story grammar elements. And for some students, we might want to do that.

We might want to have a rubric that includes the level of support that they're receiving and the number of elements that they've included, like the number of story grammar elements. And maybe a one is equivalent to having like being given a direct model and lots of prompts and cues, whereas a five on the rubric for level of support is whether they tell it independently without any support. So we can write a goal like to retell a story scoring five out of nine on the story retail rubric. However, you end up setting it up, but that rubrics are a nice way to look at multiple components. So you can look at like level of support, number of story grammar elements included. You can look at grammar, cohesive devices, and whatever is relevant for the student.

And it's a way to track progress on multiple areas. Or you can create multiple goals for those different elements. So another example would be to generate or retell a narrative using X number of cohesive devices. Because if you remember, that's something that we see when compared to typically developing peer students with specific language impairment produce narratives with less cohesive devices or incorrect use of those. And those are like conjunctions and adverbials to help kind of string the story together and make it make sense and to communicate more complex ideas in the story as well. So that could be a type of goal that we could write.

We could also write a goal for number of syntactic or grammatical errors. So those are all different types of things that we can look at. again, in the show notes, I'll give a quick recap of the goals in written format. And then you can access that at slpnow.com/195. But just a super quick recap.

Some potential goal areas that we talked about were answering questions about story grammar elements when given a short story. So that's more of the receptive part. And then when it comes to expression, we can write goals for retelling or generating narratives. And I think some helpful things that we could look at are the number of story grammar elements that are produced, the level of support required, the number of cohesive devices used.

And you can roll in other grammar goals as well, like whether they're using like pronouns and reference. Do they use the characters names and all sorts of things like that. So again, your assessment data will give you a lot more direction in terms of the specific things that you might want to add in. And again, just to recap, we talked about some different formal assessment options as well as informal.

And we, again, wanna take those multiple pieces of data when we're writing goals. We don't want to just administer the test of narrative language and write goals based on how they're scoring on those elements. We wanna look at the whole picture and consider parent teacher report and looking at work samples and classroom observations so that we're writing goals that are really meeting students where they're at and helping them access the curriculum.

Supporting our students the best that we can. So that is a wrap on narrative goals. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or feedback or ideas. Instagram is a great place to find us @slpnow. And I hope this was helpful and I'll see you next week where we're going to start diving into vocabulary goals.

Thanks!