Narrative Intervention for Building Social-Emotional Skills and Self-Regulation in Children and Adolescents: Going Beyond Language and Literacy

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Spend the day learning from internationally-renowned language and literacy expert, Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP, as she teaches you the roles of autobiographical memory, personal narratives, fictional narratives and life stories in social interactions, self-regulation and academic performance. Dr. Westby will demonstrate a variety of assessment tools for documenting development of these different types of narratives in children from preschool through adolescence. Through videos and case examples you will learn interventions using fictional stories and biographies to develop personal narratives and life stories for children with a variety of language, literacy and behavioral disorders. You will leave the day with strategies to develop students’ narrative skills to improve their social-emotional skills, self-regulation, self-identity and problem-solving. Strategies that will be taught include:

• reminiscing to promote autobiographical memory
• vocabulary for mental state/emotion words and the syntactic patterns needed to express relationships between events and mental states/emotions
• how settings influence characters and events in stories
• building narrative plots
• how physical and psychological attributes of characters in stories affect their nature and behaviors
• supporting students in making narrative inferences

Walk away with narrative interventions that will take you beyond the language and literacy work you do with children and adolescents to effectively develop their social-emotional, self-regulation and academic growth!

 

OBJECTIVES

1. Articulate the development of autobiographical/personal stories, fictional stories and life story narratives.
2. Communicate the role of autobiographical/personal stories, fictional stories and life stories in academic and social success.
3. Analyze the ways culture influences structure and content of autobiographical and fictional narratives.
4. Determine and implement appropriate tools to assess fictional and autobiographical/life story personal narratives, considering cultural influences.
5. Implement children’s and adolescent’s literature to promote development of personal narratives and life stories.
6. Develop students’ ability to make inferences by relating emotions and mental states to events.
7. Facilitate students’ recognition and production of characterization, plot and theme in fictional stories, autobiographical narratives and life stories.

OUTLINE

 

Narrative Intervention: Going Beyond Language and Literacy

• Types of narratives and their roles and functions
  • Fictional
  • Personal/autobiographical
  • Life stories
• Common Core curriculum and social skills
• Cultural variations in personal and fictional narratives

Narrative Intervention to Promote

• Social-emotional skills
• Self-regulation
• Self-identity
• Self-determination
• Problem-solving

Narrative Assessment

• Fictional narratives
  • Eliciting fictional narratives using stimuli varying in cognitive and linguistic task demands
• Personal narratives
  • Prompts for eliciting personal narratives
  • Rubrics to evaluate personal narratives
• Life stories
  • Interviewing strategies to elicit life stories
  • Rubrics to evaluate types of coherence in life stories
• Narrative microstructures and macrostructures
  • Vocabulary for thoughts and feelings (Theory of Mind) and complex syntax
  • Structure, content/plot/theme and coherence

NARRATIVE INTERVENTION STRATEGIES: INTEGRATING FICTIONAL AND PERSONAL STORIES

Strategies to Develop Autobiographical Memory and Personal Narratives

• Reminiscing that promotes autobiographical memory
• Using children’s books to trigger reminiscing
• Elements and influences of settings on stories
• Identify and build narrative plots
• Developing landscape of consciousness (Theory of Mind)
  • Making connections between emotions/ mental states and actions
  • Developing vocabulary and syntax to express connections between mental/ emotional states and behaviors/events
• Support-making narrative inferences
  • Question-answer relationships – from literal to inferential
  • Levels of language abstraction – from contextualized to decontextualized language
• Facilitate personal narrative skills to promote problem-solving and self-regulation

Strategies to Develop Life Stories

• Role of characterization in life stories
  • External (physical) and internal (psychological) traits/characteristics – identifying relationships between character traits and character behaviors and narrative events
  • Use biographies/autobiographies to understand characterization – relationships between traits and events
  • Character transformation: life turning points
• Identify and develop themes
• Support making narrative inferences
  • Think alouds
  • Questioning the author
• Facilitate life stories to develop self-identity and self-regulation