10/23/17 - Narratives/SKILL/MISL

Key points of this lecture

-By age 5, most kids are able to comprehend and produce complete stories -Norm-referenced assessments (Renfrew Bus Story, Test of Narrative Language) -Informal assessment measures (narrative language samples: frog story retells and single scene pictures, dynamic assessment: high sensitivity/specificity for bilinguals) -Progress monitoring: MISL -Evidence supporting the use of SKILL program to improve narration in school-age children (monolingual SLI, bilingual at-risk, ASD)

Explicit instruction of story elements

-Key Teaching Phrases, icons, story modeling from wordless picture books -Co-telling and retelling wordless picture books -Parallel Story Development with Icon Grid -Parallel Story Retelling with icons/without icons

SKILL uses focused stimulation

1. Modify the environment in ways that motivate the child to use the target forms 2. Model the target forms in functional contexts that encourage meaningful interactions 3. Provide multiple opportunities for children to use the treatment targets 4. Proceed from highly scaffolded and supportive contexts to more independent contexts 5. Provide contingent facilitative responses to children's utterances - recasts, vertical structures

SKILL phases

1. Teaching story grammar elements 2. Elaboration: making stories sparkle 3. Independent storytelling

Attempts

Actions related to the initiating event

Character

Agents

Story retell process

Ask children to re-tell the story with no icons or pictures. Use pictures and icons to assist children if they are unsuccessful. -Ask as many why questions as you can to get the child used to using "because" Mini-lesson on "before and after" -Especially helpful for children learning English as a second language

Parallel story development with icon grid

Ask the child to create a story that is similar to the story you have been practicing together

Phase 3: Independent storytelling

Ask them to create and edit and revise their own story to help them become more independent story tellers

Why assess narration?

Assess the ability to integrate knowledge across language domains Leads to socially and educationally-relevant goals that can be aligned with the Common Core

Macrostructure of MISL

Character Setting Initiating event Internal response Plan Attempts Consequence

Renfrew isn't good for what?

Diagnosis of LI, tends to over-identify children

Scoring the Renfrew Bus Story

Examiner transcribes the story Score according to Information Sentence length Complexity

Internal response

Feelings about the initiating event

Test and retest

First and last Short wordless picture books that yield similar levels of stories Assess story elements and productivity

Mediation session 1

Focus on elements of a complete episode (teach and provide opportunities for practice) -Problems (initiating events) -The way people feel about them -What the characters do to solve the problems -What happens as a result of the actions of the characters -How the characters feel at the end

Pena 2014 longitudinal study

Gave the dynamic assessment of narratives to 186 kids who fell in the 25th (or below) percentile (at-risk) on English and Spanish tests

Examiner supports for dynamic assessment

Give shorter examples Provide models Provide concrete explanations of parts of a story Help child work through multiple examples Give extra time for solving problems Give cues Ask elaboration questions Ask child to restate the learning goal

A note on inference

Go beyond what is explicitly stated and look at what is applied (find subtleties and nuances of meaning) Process the reader goes through to get from literal meaning to what writer intended to convey To do this, combine prior knowledge with info that IS stated in text

Single scene pictures

Have the child create a story based on one single scene (make sure there is a problem in the picture so they can talk about it) Or do it without a clear problem to make it harder for them Then transcribe Analyze complexity of story grammar elements and complexity of vocab and sentences

Highlights of phase 1

Help students focus on content of what you are teaching them, not the icons themselves

Phase 2: Elaboration: making stories sparkle

Helps children take the framework you are teaching them and make it more elaborate Add detail and complexity to a story they made already Dialogue: teach them that within a story characters can talk to each other and makes it more elaborate

Story retell

MERCER MAYER FROG STORIES Wordless picture books good for story retell (also have some examples of scripts) Narrative structure score Introduction Character development Mental states References Conflict resolution Cohesion

Phase 1: Teaching story grammar elements

Macrostructural elements of a story Teach meaning and function of icons (and vocabulary) - help them understand that they represent parts of a good story IMPORTANT: you aren't teaching these elements in an isolated fashion (the IE propels the other parts of the story, causally related)

Sentence length

Mean number of words in the five longest sentences

Elicitation formats and contexts

Modeled spontaneous, spontaneous, retell, single scene, sequenced pictures, wordless books

Comprehensive progress monitoring tool

Monitoring indicators of scholarly language (MISL) -Easy to score -Spontaneously generated narratives elicited from a single picture prompt (can be used for other stories) -Designed to measure growth in macrostructure (character, setting, initiating event, internal response, attempts, consequence) and microstructure (coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, adverbs, mental/linguistic verbs, elaborated noun phrases)

Initiating event

Motivates actions (take off) What starts the story

How does SKILL use #4 of focused stimulation? Proceed from highly scaffolded and supportive contexts to more independent contexts

Move from simple to complex stories

Pre-requisites for generating inferences during reading

Need: Fair amount of world knowledge (and activate it) to generate Ability to preserve the relationships specified in the literal text and NOT get distracted by own world knowledge

The Renfrew Bus Story

Norm-referenced assessment 3;6-6;11 Children listen to examiner read a scripted story about 12 sequenced pictures Child retells the story while looking at the pictures

Test of Narrative Language

Norm-referenced assessment 5;0-12;11 3 sections: script, personal narrative, fictional narrative Better at diagnosing or determining LI

Remember when assessing narration

Not all children with language impairments have significant difficulties with narratives Some children with language impairments have more trouble with narration than with vocabulary or grammar DON'T want to go ahead and do this with EVERY child

Clinical take-home of Renfrew

Not good for deciding if the child has a language impairment or not Better at getting information for outcomes

Information

Number of details in the story

Complexity

Number of sentences with subordinate or relative clauses

World knowledge requirements for the example of "Mary had a little lamb"

Nursery rhymes, characteristics of age, dining at home or in a restaurant, owning a pet, animal births, alcoholic beverages

Parallel story development: PACS

Plan, action, complication, sequences To help kids make more complex stories Show the icons for these 4 Plan and plan again icons, decide icon, story sparkle icon

How does SKILL use #5 of focused stimulation? Provide contingent facilitative responses to children's utterances - recasts, vertical structures

Recast what the child says in a correct, more complex way Vertical structure: questioning strategy (SKILL: used to show child how to complete the complex utterance that expresses the causal relationship) Ex: Child: Spaceship landed in the park and the girl was scared. Clinician: Why was she scared? Child: Because the aliens were ugly. Clinician: Yeah, the child was scared because the aliens were ugly.

Consequence

Results of actions related to initiating event (landing)

Mediation session 2

Review and co-construct the story the child told in session 1 Practice a new story

Findings of Pena 2014 longitudinal study

Sensitivity: 89% (correctly identified 9/10 kids who had LI) Specificity: 89% (correctly idetified 9/10 kids who did not have LI) Positive predictive ability: 89% These are really good scores and may help you make diagnostic decisions about bilingual children

Personal narrative

Sequenced pictures Comprehension (literal and inferential) Story creation (macro and microstructure)

MISL

Specifically made to measure progress on story telling and growth in narration macrostructure and microstructure Scores: 0-3 (Scores of 2s for younger kids, 2s and 3s for older kids)

How does SKILL use #1 of focused stimulation? Modify the environment in ways that motivate the child to use the target forms

Start with wordless picture books with smiple stories and move to more complex to teach macro- and microstructures

Script

Story about an event that a lot of children would have experience with (eating out) No picture Comprehension (child tells a story and then asks the child to solve a problem and asks questions about what the child heard) Solve problem Retell Word complexity

Additional components incorporated into SKILL

Story modeling for macrostructure elements Visual/Graphic organizers Pictography - child/clinician drawings Co-telling - prompted co-created Comprehension checks - literal and inferential Multiple retelling Parallel stories (make up a story like the one they just heard) Independent story generation from single scenes

Informal approaches to narrative

Story retell Single scene pictures Two ways we think about collecting narratives to analyze

Highlights of phase 3

Students move from creating stories based on sequential pictures, to single-picture scenes. Self-scoring rubric gives students independence by internalizing the story grammar elements and moves them away from using the icons.

Highlights of phase 2

Students taught to add dialogue to their stories (which assists in increasing linguistic complexity). The addition of Complications to stories helps make them more complex. Lessons in adding adverbs to help elaborate on Action

SKILL

Supporting knowledge in language and literacy One of many narrative intervention programs (they are all very similar)

Key Teaching Phrases, icons, story modeling from wordless picture books

Talk about story elements in the context of a story

Dynamic assessment of narratives

Test --> teach --> retest approach Helpful for determining goals, checking to see if therapy is working,

Mediation sessions (teach)

This happens between test and retest Two short sessions (2-3 days in between) Demonstrate critical components of a story Provide guided practice in producing stories that contain critical components

Plan

Thoughts about actions to take based on IE "SO, he DECIDED to..."

How does SKILL use #3 of focused stimulation? Provide multiple opportunities for children to use the treatment targets

Throughout phases, children have repeated opportunities to create stories (with and without clinician)

Setting

Time and place

Fictional narrative

Use a single scene picture and ask the child to create a story with a problem Comprehension (literal and inferential) Story creation (macro and microstructure)

How does SKILL use #2 of focused stimulation? Model the target forms in functional contexts that encourage meaningful interactions

Use materials that make it clear how to create a story with causal and temporal relationships between the story elements

Research on Renfrew

Useful for predicting language impairment (one of the few) Children with higher information scores were more likely to have good therapy outcomes Good prediction after 1 and 3 years, fair prediction to age 15 Better at giving information about outcomes in the future

Why use examiner supports?

With this support, what is the child able to do? Then take these cues away and give them another opportunity to do it on their own. What changes?