Let’s start with the basics—what is narrative development? Can you explain it in simple terms for readers who may not be familiar with it? Why is it so important to help students with reading and language skills?
Narrative development is the ability to understand, retell, and tell a story with increasing complexity over time, such as simple storytelling as a toddler: “Me and mommy at the park” to more complex stories told by a school-aged child. A story has parts to it that reflect a situation in life, a book, a movie, or a video. These parts are termed “story grammar.” Grammar is simply a way to organize the rules of something, such as “English Grammar.” Stories have parts that relate to the big structure needed to be comprehended or discussed: characters, settings, initiating events, feelings/thoughts, plans, actions to carry out the plans, consequences, and resolutions.
Narrative development is important because being able to understand and express stories aids in social interactions, making and sustaining friendships, problem-solving, and perspective-taking. It is crucial for building oral language skills, as well as providing the foundation for reading comprehension and story writing.
Maryellen Rooney Moreau, creator of the Story Grammar Marker® (SGM) and president of Mindwing Concepts, created icons for the parts of a story, and they have been in use for 35 years! These icons are nonlinguistic representations of the content of the story and directly relate to the story parts. These icons are located on the Story Grammar Marker hands-on tool, which is a visual, tactile, kinesthetic device to help aid in the comprehension, generation, and retelling of stories. The icons are also represented in the Story Grammar Marker Boom™ digital stories.
Tell us about your background, what inspired your focus on oral language and literacy development, and the key areas you’re most passionate about in your work.
Miranda O’Donnell has been a speech-language pathologist since 2006, and she’s worked with children from age 2 to high school age. In 2016, her school district had Maryellen and her daughter Sheila come in and do a workshop on narrative development using the Story Grammar Marker approach, which was really the ‘kick-off’ to her journey to focus on oral language and literacy development using this framework. Since then, she has been very passionate about teaching narrative language skills to my students, fellow colleagues, and families through therapy sessions, teaching classrooms, and workshops.
Maryellen Rooney Moreau’s background is in the area of communication development and disorders. She is a speech/language pathologist and has been for over 50 years. She has worked with people from the age of 2 to 92, assisting them with communication and language development. She was inspired most by my first position as a teacher of children with language disabilities. It is now known as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). That, and her years at the American International College/Diagnostic Center and school for children with dyslexia and language learning disabilities cemented her interest and passion for the fields of oral language development and literacy.
What are some common challenges students face with literacy and oral language development? How do tools like Story Grammar Marker help overcome these challenges?
Miranda:
Common challenges that I’ve seen are students not knowing how to understand, generate, retell, or write a story because they don’t have a framework and/or language skills. The Story Grammar Marker is an explicit teaching approach that teaches story grammar elements using special icons (e.g., character, setting, problem ‘kick-off,’ feeling, plan, attempts, outcome, resolution) using a visual, tactile, kinesthetic tool (i.e., story braid) when understanding, generating, retelling, and writing stories. It not only teaches a framework for storytelling, but it also builds oral language along the way because you can also work on skills such as vocabulary, inferencing, and sentence structure, which build discourse-level language skills.
Maryellen:
Challenges relate to life and to academics. Social communication involves oral language to form bonds and friendships and to be able to solve problems between people. Academics relates to the oral language foundations of reading and writing. The SGM assists students to improve their abilities to interact, to take turns to tell their stories, elaborate on their thoughts, and focus on feelings and plans of action to solve a problem. It also relates to the problem/solving structure of information texts to build knowledge.
For parents or educators who are new to this approach, how would you explain the benefits of combining oral language and literacy skills?
They go hand in hand. Oral language is the foundation, so if it can be nurtured and expanded to the discourse level of language where stories, conversations and information content is structured and communicated, communication skills are nurtured and improved at all levels: sounds, words, sentences, and stories!
Oral language skills are the foundation for the development of literacy skills. Oral language comprehension skills such as background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning (e.g. inferencing, metaphor), and literacy knowledge (e.g., print concepts, story grammar/discourse language) are all integral skills that are necessary for reading comprehension as seen on the Scarborough’s Reading Rope (SRR) (see below). Reading comprehension is combined with reading skills (on the lower part of the SRR) such as phonemic awareness, decoding, and sight word recognition to make reading possible. In the Simple View of Reading equation by Gough and Tunmer: Word Recognition (Decoding) X Language Comprehension=Reading Comprehension, the language comprehension portion relates to oral language development and its connection to literacy. Please also view the Story Grammar Marker infographic below, which depicts how the progression of oral language comprehension intertwines with the development of discourse, situation model, literacy skills, and higher-order thinking.
In your experience, what are the benefits of using a narrative language development approach in speech-language therapy, particularly for students who struggle with reading and writing?
It is helpful to know what level of narrative language development a child is currently at so I can meet them where they are at and push them to the next level through modeling, explicit teaching, and gradual release of responsibility to the student.
Can you share a breakthrough moment or success story where using Story Grammar Marker Boom digital stories, in collaboration with Mary-Ellen, significantly impacted a student’s progress, primarily through the lens of narrative language development?
I used the Story Grammar Marker Boom digital stories along with the Story Grammar Marker story braid in therapy with a little boy last year for around 10 sessions. When I assessed him initially, he was significantly below the average range (i.e., 3rd percentile). After around ten sessions, I noticed an improvement in his storytelling skills, which has been a typical result of this intervention. But he also said to me that using the digital stories and the story braid was helping with his memory. He told me that he and a friend planned to get a surprise gift for his teacher and that planning the story (i.e., knowing the story’s grammar elements) about how he and his friend were going to do it helped him plan and remember the steps of how to go about it (e.g., they knew that she liked chocolate so they would go to the store the day before her birthday and buy it, then they would wait until a certain time the next day, finally they would give it to her as a surprise, and she would love it). This not only helped with his academics, but it transcended to his social life. When I assessed him following therapy sessions, his score was in the average range.
Could you walk us through a typical session using Story Grammar Marker Boom digital stories? How do you integrate literacy and speech therapy in a way that keeps students engaged?
I have 24 stories that I can access during the year, and they are organized in seasons that have been engaging for the students. The stories can stand on their own, but if you progress from stories 1 to 24, the stories do connect, and the students notice this and make connections to previous stories, which is very important because this means they are generating inferences and utilizing their working memory. Using the built-in visuals and activities that come with the digital stories, such as the comprehension questions, feelings wheel, Critical Thinking Triangle®, and sequencing activities, has kept the students very engaged in sessions.
During an intervention session, I first read the story or play the audio version of the story for the student/s; then, I get them to sequence the activity after I retell the story using the story braid (depending on how much scaffolding they need), and later they retell the story using the Story Grammar Marker tool. Finally, I ask them the comprehension questions. I also utilize the feelings wheel and Critical Thinking Triangle to teach perspective-taking during my sessions.
In a classroom setting, first I put the story up on a smart board or TV, then I read the story to the class; after that, I have students come up to the screen and take turns with the sequencing activity while saying that part of the story. Later, once the story is sequenced, I model the retelling using the Story Grammar Marker tool. Finally, I ask the students to sequence the story grammar elements from the story on their own tablet and then try retelling the story with a partner using the Story Grammar Marker tool. The comprehension questions, feelings wheel, and Critical Thinking Triangle can be utilized in the classroom as well. Many teachers use these oral language lessons as a segue for story writing, using the Story Grammar Marker graphic organizer for writing.
The stories are illustrated in a way that highlights each story’s grammar element (e.g., problem/unexpected event ‘kick-off,’ feeling, plan) and vocabulary for feelings (e.g., panicked), thinking words (e.g., knew) and planning words (e.g., decided) are written in the stories as well. For example, after the ‘kick-off,’ Ruby feels panicked because she thinks her friend Carlos might have a broken arm (which is depicted by her facial expression and thought bubble), then she makes a plan (as depicted by the lightbulb) and decides to get help from Rowena because she remembered that she lived in the woods close by. These are the elements found in the Critical Thinking Triangle, which is such an important skill for students to learn because it helps them understand the causal structure of the main idea of a story and the thoughts/feelings/motivations of other characters.
How can educators or therapists get started with using Story Grammar Marker or the Story Grammar Marker Boom digital stories in their own practice? What are some easy first steps?
For the Story Grammar Marker Boom digital stories, you can go right to ‘Resources and Information’ to give you some visuals and background information and go to the ‘Demos using the Story Grammar Marker’ for videos on how to work on each level of narrative development. For a classroom, you can use the ages and stages guide in the ‘resource and information’ tab to give you a sense of where to start with your classroom. The stories have an interactive sequencing activity at the end, so this is a great classroom activity that kids love to do, whether it’s on the smartboard or their own devices. Students can also practice retelling the stories to each other after they do the sequencing activity. This is a great segue for writing stories since children learn from each other. The stories are differentiated, so if you have students who need a challenge or need an easier level, you can give them the same story but at a different level. You can see a video of a classroom activity on my Instagram @slpstoryhouse.
For intervention, you can formally assess a student by using free online tools such as the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI) for story generation with pictures or the CUBED Narrative Language Measures for story retelling without pictures. This will give you an idea of what level of narrative development you can start at, and then you would pick right above the stage that the child is at and work gradually up the stages. This incorporates the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky). You can see a video of an intervention activity on my Instagram @slpstoryhouse. Check out decks from her Boom Store, SLP Story House.
In addition to free webinars and lesson plans, the Story Grammar Marker materials, such as Story Grammar Marker tools, magnets, posters, manuals, etc., can be purchased through MindWing Concepts.
What role do you see technology playing in the future of literacy development?
Having access to technology and its ever-evolving features provides the opportunity for busy teachers to seamlessly plan for students to get customized and differentiated instruction for literacy goals.
How do tools like Boom evolve alongside new educational trends?
Boom has an extensive library of evidence-based activities that have been created by authors who are constantly up on the latest research. The technology that Boom employs allows authors to create resources and reach students at all different levels of learning and access points.
To finish up, is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers about narrative language development, the future of speech-language therapy, or any exciting upcoming projects you and Maryellen are working on?
Maryellen and Sheila are working on a course for teachers entitled ‘Language Comprehension Competencies Institute’ and are using the cards to demonstrate the stages of narrative development in the most straightforward and explicit way so the children can realize that this process is doable in the very busy classroom. Once they see an example in the course, then teachers can use the SGM Boom cards to jump right in and will be motivated to use them in the classroom. The course will be released in December 2024 through MindWing Concepts.
