Speaking and Listening through Narrative

Speaking and Listening Through Narrative is a structured, multisensory, flexible and adaptable approach to teaching children how to tell stories. As an intervention it follows the developmental pattern that children typically move through in their acquisition of narrative skills – working on the individual components that make up a story and gradually combining these elements using a structured framework that children are then taught to use for themselves. Research shows us that even children aged 4-5 years without language difficulties, given the right context, are able to convey adequate information, taking into account the listener’s knowledge and organising the content of what they say to demonstrate that they have some knowledge of story structure (Botting, 2002).