Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists know much more about children's development of fictional narratives than they do about children's development of personal narratives and the role these personal narratives play in academic success, social-emotional development, and self-regulation. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide clinicians with strategies for assessing and developing children's and adolescents' personal narratives. Method: This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) the development of autobiographical event narratives and life stories, (b) factors that contribute to development of these genres, (c) the importance of these genres for the development of sense of self-identity and self-regulation, (d) deficits in personal narrative genres, and (e) strategies for eliciting and assessing event narratives and life stories. Implications: To promote development of personal event narratives and life stories, speech-language pathologists can help clients retrieve information about interesting events, provide experiences worthy of narrating, and draw upon published narratives to serve as model texts. Clinicians can also address four interrelated processes in intervention: reminiscing, reflecting, making coherent connections, and signaling the plot structure. Furthermore, they can activate metacognitive awareness of how evaluations of experiences, coherence, and plot structure are signaled in well-formed personal event narratives and life stories.

Curriculum-based emergent literacy assessment in early childhood.

Speech-language pathologists who work in early childhood settings are concerned with monitoring and evaluating progress and making appropriate instructional adjustments to promote at-risk children's language and literacy development. Curriculum-based assessment can be effective in providing practitioners with this type of information. This article discusses processes and procedures for implementing curriculum-based assessment and suggests methods that professionals can use to teach assessment tasks to children who struggle with the task demands.

Quantitative and qualitative documentation of early literacy instruction.

Quantitative and qualitative procedures were used in this pilot study to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a language and literacy instruction model for meeting the needs of children with impairments, delays, and differences in regular Head Start classrooms. Although the project addresses a variety of literacy domains, this article focuses on rhyming and letter naming. In the instruction model, children were exposed to motivating examples of rhyme and letter targets in different activity structures embedded across the curriculum. A crossover design compared two classrooms of children trained on letter and rhyme targets in a different order. Results of an analysis of variance revealed a significant Condition (rhyme first vs. letter first) x Task (rhyme generation vs. letter generation) x Time (Posttest 1 vs. Posttest 2) interaction. At the first posttest, children in the rhyme-first condition performed better than those in the letter-first condition on rhyme generation, whereas children in the letter first condition performed better on letter generation. At the second posttest, after the groups had experienced instruction in both areas, the children performed comparably on both tasks. In addition to the quantitative analyses, qualitative analyses were also conducted. A qualitative examination of children's participation revealed their affective involvement and engagement in instructional activities. Changes in the children's awareness of their capacity to rhyme and changes in their displayed abilities to participate in rhyming activities were also documented.