The ability to sustain a dialogue and move it along in a meaningful way is often a specific problem for children who have communication difficulties.
To help tackle this, practitioners in Stockport have been using a new technique which encourages children to focus on the individual components of a story. This involves retelling its narrative and generating their own ideas around it.
The approach uses visual and spoken prompts to help children organise and structure their responses to questions. It addresses both their receptive and expressive language difficulties, as well as developing important pre-verbal skills. It can also be used to support other areas of the curriculum.
The use of narrative therapy to develop children's listening, attention, receptive and oral language skills has been the subject of a pilot study in Stockport, conducted by speech and language therapists Judith Carey and Becky Shanks.
The study was carried out in nine nursery schools in the area and involved approximately 800 children. While Becky Shanks was concentrating on older children in Key Stage 1, Judith Carey and her team were spending a day a week at each nursery, helping deliver the narrative approach to those whom practitioners believed would benefit from it.
The children were mainly from socially deprived areas, and the majority had delayed listening skills as well as limited vocabulary and poorly developed sentence structure.
She explains how the approach was incorporated. 'Our work was built around the Foundation Stage curriculum, so all the topics we worked with would have happened anyway. We wanted something that could be fitted round the curriculum and that would not involve high-intensity training.
'With sessions easily adapted to particular groups of children, the approach is ideal for nursery children, as they can be set up to mirror the nursery curriculum. This enables staff to use the narrative approach to extend certain topic areas.'
The who, why and where The sessions were built around the idea of breaking down the essential components of a story. First, the children concentrated on 'who' with activities to tie in, then they moved on to 'where', building on storytelling skills like this. These could be adapted to familiar Foundation Stage topics such as 'mini-beasts', 'people who help us' or 'my family'. Activities focusing on listening, understanding and core topic vocabulary were an important part of the sessions.
Children were also helped by a colour-coding system. Judith explains, 'All the who words were on orange bits of card, the where bits on red card, and so on. So when the children were making up sentences they knew to incorporate the correct colours.'
She adds, 'This went extremely well. Language skills increased significantly and teachers reported that literacy improved. We now have nursery children who can describe all the narrative ingredients of a story - the who, where, what and why of events.'
The pilot study was so successful that the approach is now being rolled out across Stockport and in Sure Start areas nationwide. The past 12 months have been very busy for Judith and Becky, as they have put together resource packs for teachers and practitioners, as well as speech and language therapists.
There are seven packs available, each focusing on a different age group, or children of a certain level. They are used widely, not just with children in areas of language deprivation, but with those having many types of language difficulty. Each pack contains a range of activities with clear instructions, sample session plans and picture resources to be photocopied.
Judith is encouraged by how the work is progressing, and by the feedback they have received.
She says, 'Teachers have said that the packs are fantastic resources, not least because they pull together many different elements of good practice in an imaginative way.' NW
Further information
* For details of courses and packs contact Black Sheep Press at www.
blacksheep-epress. com/pages/ResWig.htm.