Narrative Language Intervention: Interview with Douglas Petersen Part One - Ep. 023
Are you looking for ways to harness the power of narrative language intervention? Have we got a treat for you! Join me in this interview with Douglas Petersen, co-creator of the narrative language intervention tool, Story Champs. Doug is one of the pioneers in analyzing the components of narrative language, so that it’s easy to teach and easy to learn.
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Free Download: Connecting Words Bingo
Language Dynamics Group - Story Champs
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Douglas: Everyone tells stories, and so of course it universally applies to everyone and it functionally applies to them. Everyone needs to learn how to tell what happened to them at recess when they got hurt or whatever it might be. Right, this is totally ubiquitous across our culture and all cultures.
Denise: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I'm your host, Denise Stratton, and today we're talking about narrative language. I'm so excited to have Doug Petersen as my guest today, he's here to talk about his approach for teaching narrative language called Story Champs, and generally share his expertise in all things about narrative language. So thank you for joining us, Doug. To start, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and where you are now.
Douglas: Sure, thank you for having me. So, I'm Douglas Petersen and I'm a professor at Brigham Young University in the Department of Communication Disorders. And I have been here at BYU for about three years, three and a half years now.
And prior to that, I was at the university of Wyoming. And, um, I do, as you mentioned, research narrative language assessment, and narrative language intervention, a contextualized language intervention, I should say. It's beyond just narration. And I also research a multi-tiered systems of support. I have a pretty big focus on MTSS for language and the progress monitoring tools and the tiered interventions that go along with that and dynamic assessment, I have to mention also.
Denise: Okay, that's a lot to process, so we're going to work through that. But when I was in graduate school and it was around 1989, one of our language professors said, you know, we're starting to figure out that stories are good way to teach language, but she couldn't offer anything clinically useful that time. If you went out there as a clinician and tried to dive into a book with a child, you could get so lost so fast. So how did you come to be interested in narrative language and figure out how we can make it clinically useful?
Douglas: Yeah, it's such a great question. Um, I was very fortunate to have Dr. Carol Strong as a professor at Utah State University. And, um, Carol was this pioneer conceptually in this idea that children, uh, first learned to talk like talking and then they learn to talk like books and it is through this exposure to literature and literate language that develops this, this, uh, complexity of language. And in conjunction with that, Carol Strong talked about Carol Westby(?) all the time, and Carol Westby and Judith Johnston, they proposed this concept that oral narratives are a bridge to written language. And that when you use a narrative, you are forced to talk more like a book to talk in this. Uh, not always, of course, but a lot of the time in this academic, sort of, um, discourse. And so if you think about children who have language disorders, it's often a difficult for them to read and to understand what they're reading.
And so they are not exposed to this academic language in the literature, like other children. And so it's just like this Matthew effect, the poor just keep getting poor and poor. They're not exposed to this language and. The two Carols, they really sort of struck this idea that, you know what, you can work on this academic language without a book, you can work on it through storytelling.
Even if the child doesn't know how to read, they can still get exposure to and learn to talk in this way, even if they don't know how to write. And so all of that sort of led me down this path of exploring narratives in particular, right as this, as both this thing to teach, to teach how to tell a story, but also as the medium to embed any language target into a narrative and to teach it through that contextualized process.
Denise: And that's what I love about Story Champs is it's not a book. It can lead children to books, but before story grammars were developed, and story grammars, and you have your characters, you have your setting, you have your problem, your reactions, all that. Um, like I said, if you picked it up and tried to go through it with a child, it would be so complex. You would get lost because these children are very basic, don't even understand the basic story. And yet you've got a story with all sorts of complications, all kinds of setting, all kinds of motivations, even really simple kids stories. So over the years, I've moved through to other story grammar programs before I landed at Story Champs, my third and my favorite, my absolute favorite, because you've got stories for us pre-drawn, pre-made, and so simple that if a child is ready to do stories, they can not get lost. And that's what I love.
Douglas: Right? Yes. So that was, uh, that was, uh, a really important element in Story Champs, this idea that, um, we wanted to systematically increase the complexity of language over time and be very explicit about it. So you'll see that. There are, as you mentioned, there are stories in there and there are different levels of stories. So the same story can have 10 different levels of complexity and different targets that you can focus on depending on what the student needs. Um, and then of course, it's supposed to be the case that you learn how to teach narrative language, following these procedures that we've outlined that come from our research. And then you extend that also to literature that's out there, right? To you extend that to the child's curriculum and to the books that they're reading as well. But these little books that we have are absolutely there to help guide the clinician and just systematically increasing the complexity over time.
Denise: Yes, 'cause you can't start with a book most times. Most of the clients, I'm starting Story Champs with couldn't start with a book. When I was at a state conference last year and Trina Spencer, who also helped develop Story Champs, right, presented on Story Champs, I was like, I've been using this, but I haven't been using it to its full effect. I mean, she really described how you do this and kind of gave us like a quick start. Can you describe that quick start? How do you implement Story Champs? I had the kit and everything. I missed that quick-start page.
Douglas: Yeah, sure. It's really, it is really conceptually simple. It's this idea that, um, you have scaffolds to support the child. Pictures, icons, um, that are there to help the child learn the very, very basic story grammar structure. And, um, and you start out basic with just the core elements that are necessary to create a complete episode. And all you're doing is you're not just telling the child the story, you are having them practice retelling the story and producing their own stories. And that's such a key active ingredient in something like Story Champs.
And so what you do is you have all the pictures and icons in front of the child and you tell the story, you model it, and then you have them tell it back to you and you stop them at any time that they get something wrong, or they forget something, or omit something, and you do it in a very natural way.
So it's very normal to do this in a storytelling context. If I were telling you a story and you started to get confused about who I was talking about or where that person was, you would stop me, and you would say, wait, wait, hang on a minute. I'm a little confused about who you're talking about. It's totally natural. It's okay to do that. And so we do that all the time with these students, we stop them and we ask them an open-ended question. Who is the story about, or what was the problem in the story? And then if they can't answer that question, then we model for them what to say, and we have them tell that part in the story itself, they go back one step in the story and cohesively include that piece in the story.
Denise: I love that it's so important that you don't let them flounder or practice their error. It's a little bit of an errorless learning.
Douglas: That's exactly right. Yep. That's exactly right. And so then, I mean, so I kind of like to think of, of a Story Champs as like little mini Dungeons and Dragons sessions. And I think this probably drives Trina crazy. Yeah. I think about these kids who play this old game, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, and what you have is you've got this person who's this Dungeon Master, who is supposed to tell the other characters what's happening in their world and they have to use storytelling to do it. And if you, if you sit back and watch someone who's really good at being a Dungeon Master, they have exceptionally strong oral language skills because they practice telling these stories and painting the landscape of the world with their language. And now I'm not suggesting that all the kids playing-doing Story Champs are playing D&D, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying it's built on the same concept of, you know, the more that you practice producing and being exposed to this academic language, the better you get at it. And that has real serious consequences for your ability to understand what you read and for your ability to write as well. Right? This is all very connected to oral language. This reading comprehension, writing the foundation is oral language.
If I, if I listen to someone who's a really good storyteller, um, the chances of them being really good at understanding complex language, because they're using it, and their ability to write academically because they're also producing orally, the chanc is really high that they're going to be very good at that.
Denise: Well, it's the two sides of the same coin thing that they're just so interconnected. And what I really love is how Trina showed us how she diminished the cues. So after they tell it once you take the pictures away and they tell it with the icons, you take the icons away and they tell it on their own, and you see their wheels turning in their head as they start to figure out how to connect these pieces and how to say it. And I love, they'll say one way, one time, one way another time. And they're both right. Yeah, they don't have to memorize a story, they're internalizing how to tell a story with words that connect a story together. And I think that's genius. It's genius the way you have them practice it so many times, but you remove some cues.
Douglas: Right, that's a really important piece. Um, and you'll notice that in this, in the master lesson plans for Story Champs, the children, um, listened to the whole story. And then we do break pieces apart sometimes and focus on certain elements. But at the end there, they are producing that story again in its entirety.
And you get this, you can see this in Teresa Ukrainetz, it's a book on contextualized language intervention, this whole, part, whole concept. Right? And so at the end of a session, we do scaffold, but then we withdraw the scaffold systematically to where the child is producing independently, or as independently as possible, the story. Then one of the things that's really key is we're not having the children just memorize one story, we use multiple exemplars because it's not about them learning the story. It's about them learning the structure, the story grammar, and learning to use complex, um, language features across multiple stories.
Denise: And I love that, especially with the kids with autism. I love how you say well, after school, or on Saturday, or on the weekend, you know, even you change the setting. If I don't do that with my kids with autism, I mean, honestly, I write my own stories for them too, because they're not enough. I love your Story Champ stories, but they're not enough if I'm writing.
So I'm writing my own to, to fill in holes and one autistic child, we were just doing one day, one day, one day, with each story, I was just trying to get him going. And then he was frozen in that and I had to get, had to back up, had to back up, okay. And teach him that every story didn't start with a one day. So it's a much, much better to be varied from the beginning.
And then you also have them tell their own stories. I mean, describe the post-it note thing with the icons. That's so wonderful.
Douglas: Sure, yeah. So, um, so, so this actually kind of emerged from my work, uh, 20 years ago, working in the schools. At first, this is a little embarrassing, but at first I thought, okay, I'm going to do narrative language intervention or narrative based language intervention, and no one was doing it.
And I just had these ideas from Carol Strong, Carol Westby, to Johnston and other individuals. Um, and then later Ron Gillum, who's also doing narrative intervention work, and Sandy Gillum. I at first just had one story, and then I'd increase the complexity of that story throughout the school year. And this is what I had the children practice retelling.
And of course they got very good at it, right. Like, so I could show this amazing growth from, you know, the beginning of the year to the end of the year. And of course, you know, I shouldn't say of course, but thankfully like halfway through the year, I started realizing, you know, this is showing growth. Yes, but it's this generalizing to anything at all. So I started having the children generate their own stories, and I wanted still to have pictures to scaffold. And so I just would grab sticky notes and very quickly sketch what the children were talking about that and drew something on a sticky note that represented each part of their story.
And then Teresa Ukrainetz has also has done some research on that. I think she calls it sketch and say, oh boy, sketch and speak, something like that. Whereas this same idea of using this pictography to scaffold the children. So, yeah, and that's important to do, right? Because it's not just about retelling stories, we also have to generate our own stories in life, whether it's orally or in written form. And so helping the children with that, is just as equally important.
Denise: At a certain point, they get super excited about telling their own stories, which is just wonderful.
Douglas: Right. And that's that really highlights something super important. You'll notice that in Story Champs, we focus on personal themed stories and we try to write these stories about things that students or children could really relate to. So getting hurt, getting lost, something like that. And the reason why is because when you, when you retell a story like that, there's obviously a life connection to it.
But then we also ask the children to tell us us a story about a time when something like that happened to them. And when you are telling the story about something in your life, you're not bored. You don't need to play Candy Land on the side, you are interested in yourself, you're interested in it. Also it draws out emotions and we know that those emotions also facilitate memory. And so all of those things converge to lead to this, this approach that with of a lot of our research has yielded really strong effect sizes.
Denise: Yeah. And I think when you talk about memory, the emotions, also the drawing brings out memory. When I have kids draw their own pictures, if they can, really cement something there in their memory. So I just love it.
Douglas: Yeah. There's a mult- there's some multisensory aspect here. We do have the children do gestures as well.
Denise: It's like pre-journaling almost, it's kind of how I think of it. Okay. So let's move on. So what skills does a child need to have solid before beginning Story Champs intervention?
Douglas: Right. So really some just very basic skills. Storytelling is discourse, it's monologic usually, or at least most of the time, meaning that superly just kind of one person who's, who's telling the story. There are different ways to tell stories, of course, across different cultures. And some of them are more of a call response or topic associating approach, but we tend to teach the Stein and Glen sort of approach that's that's reinforced in the schools. And so. So with the, um, I totally forgot what I was saying.
Denise: What does the child need to begin in Story Champs? Because not everyone is ready. Not every preschool is ready to start it. You got to know.
Douglas: Right. Sorry. So, yeah. So you have to be at a point where you can use more than single words, right? Or I suppose you could tell a story with just individual words, but it'd be a very unique story and hard to follow.
Denise: There would be no cause and effect, right, right. Sentence structure, you have to have some sentence structure.
Douglas: Yes. And I, and I'm really glad you bring up this idea of cause and effect and this, uh, concept of time also. So in stories, causality drives stories very much. So you are explaining why people do things or why things occur. And then also stories are usually told in a temporal order. So a time sequence. So having those concepts in place are pretty important. And then obviously having some kind of MLU beyond one where you can add a couple of words together is important. There's some other super basic skills, but you can work on storytelling with a two-year-old, or with a three-year-old or with children with pretty complex communication needs, especially if you recognize that the heart of the story is just the initiating event or the problem, the attempt, the consequence. And, um, of course a character has gotta be in there somewhere, so you know what's happening.
But if you understand it at that basic of a level and you realize a story can be told with very, very simple language, like John was walking. John fell. John was sad. John got help. Even at that very basic level, you're teaching the story grammar structure, and then once that's in place, once they get that story grammar structure, then you can start to increase the complexity of the language into it.
Denise: What I love about story champs is for all my language clients, I would say there was a time when narrative instruction is right for them. So it's not like some methods you might try where we say, well, that didn't work for that child. You know, that's, that's just not something I'm going to do. It's so broad in its application that that's not the case.
Yeah. Some of my clients have to get to a point where they're ready for it, but it's applicable for every kind of language client you have.
Douglas: Right. I, I think that that's so important to highlight because narrative based language intervention is essentially doing language intervention with children in a meaningful way, uh, using language in a communication, uh, with a communication purpose, which is why we use language, right, is to communicate.
And so this facilitates generalization and everyone tells stories. And so of course it universally applies to everyone and it functionally applies to them. Everyone needs to learn how to tell what happened to them at recess when they got hurt or whatever it might be. Right. This is totally ubiquitous across our culture and all, all cultures.
Denise: For sure. In fact, one of my clients, um, this was a year ago. It was really interesting, she had been bullied pretty bad in the playground. But she was able to tell the complete story to the principal, with the cause-effect everything which is pretty major undertaking for her, but when we're working on the story narrative for a long time, she, she got her needs met, because she could tell what happened to her.
That was just like, whoa, just talking about this, how broad the application is. Do you find that narrative instruction can resolve language deficits in areas like we've got describing, sorting, recognizing same and different, all these kinds of goals that we speech therapists could have.
Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. And it's only because it's language. And so in this narrative discourse, you can target anything, anything, because it is language that we are using to tell the story. So I've kind of drawn this distinction between narrative intervention and narrative based intervention and narrative intervention is this idea that you are working on storytelling, you're gonna work on the story, grammar, and key linguistic features of narration, but then there's also the other idea of narrative based language intervention, where narrative is the base narrative is the modality or the medium, and you are targeting anything and everything that has to do with language within that context and the reason why it works so well is because yes, you can target very, very simple basic language structures through narration, but narratives also allow you to target very complex language features still in a meaningful way, because a good storyteller is good at describing the world. And that requires adverbs and adjectives, and it requires complex subordination and so forth.
Denise: It requires organization of language, so unconsciously some things are just corrected. I realized, I don't even know where the Granny's Candies game is, which I bought when I first started my clinic, which is all about describing, sorting, organizing same and different. I have another thing that inferences a box that I bought. I don't even open it up anymore because the narrative language does it all, you don't need another game.
Douglas: Yeah. So I feel like what better way to target language than in language and why, why decontextualize, why remove it from the meaningful task? It, it only makes sense to embed what you're focusing on in a meaningful context as much as possible, and if you do have to extract specific language targets from it, then you need to embed them back in, so the generalization happens, so that it's meaningful.
Denise: It's much better to just pull a book now, I think where you can pull something out and focus on it. So you talked about how effective this is and how you've got some great research on it. Would you just share without going into deep detail, but some of the research on how effective narrative language is, for reading, for writing?
Douglas: Sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So we started out with very basic questions, um, working our way through ethic efficacy questions. So does, does contextualize language intervention using narratives or using expository, does that. Increase children's oral language? Does it improve both their, their macro structure, their story grammar, and does it also improve their micro structure?
So those are like our very basic questions. And we asked that question about children with language disorder and children without a language disorder. What kind of impact does it have? And we've done several, several studies on that and we'd sort of systematically worked our way through that, right. Starting out with very early stage trials.
And then we've moved up into large scale randomized controlled trials. And the outcome measures that we're looking at have changed as well. We sort of feel like, okay, this is kind of an old question now about whether narrative based language intervention improves children's oral language. There's no, nothing's ever conclusive and definitive, but it's a question we're not really asking anymore.
We're asking now, um, does narrative based language intervention not only improve oral language, but it does it also improve writing. And does it improve reading comprehension and other, um, more distal, or what we perceive to be more distal outcome measures. And so we've conducted, I have no idea now, 30, 40 different studies, um, with Story Champs and consistently we get strong effect sizes.
And those are, I like to think those are meaningful effect sizes. We're measuring outcomes that are meaningful to these children, right? Their ability to understand and produce complex language, their ability to understand what they read, to write, and so forth.
Denise: And clinically just when you start using it, you see how effective it is, but it's great to have that, that research.
Douglas: Well, it's so important, right. And, and I think I wanna just clarify here that, um, Trina, Spencer and I did not start out thinking we're going to make Story Champs. It was instead this process of where we are going to research narrative based, narrative language intervention, expository language intervention, and then we started finding really strong results. And of course we did this in collaboration with many other researchers as well, including the Gillums. Then we started reporting the results and presenting the results. And so then speech language pathologists and educators, because this is a multi-tiered system of support.
This is, Story Champs is designed to be used for large classrooms, small group, individual, and so forth. The demand got to a point where we had to take our research and this is key, right? We had to take our research and turn it into something that individuals could use on the ground. And so that's really where Story Champs came from.
Denise: I'm sorry to leave you hanging, but that's all the time we have for this podcast this week. We'll pick up the rest of Doug's interview next week. In the meantime, you can head over to my free resource library and get my storytelling connecting words bingo. It's a bingo game that motivates clients to use conjunctions, such as when, but, because, and so forth, as they tell stories. You can find that at SLP proadvisor.com/free that's at SLP proadvisor.com/free.
Dan: Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP pro-advisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise's highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs.
A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you think. Join the conversation at SLP pro-advisor.
