A narrative is defined as a spoken or written (including Augmentative and Alternative Communication modalities) monological telling or retelling of past events, either real or imaginary. Importantly, narratives contain causally related events told/retold in a temporal sequence acceptable to the verbal community in which it is used. 

Narratives are powerful tools for supporting language development of diverse children, including those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). We live our lives and think in story format. This ability has evolved alongside human development and has facilitated the emergence and transfer of complex language. The narrative is useful, versatile, and pervasive because the human brain is skilled at detecting patterns. Narrative interventions that capitalize on this fact will discover that the patterns of narrative, and language generally, allow for rapid transfer across contexts, modalities, and languages. 

In this talk, Dr. Spencer will unpack the discourse-, sentence-, and word-level patterns that are inextricably integrated within a narrative. These include the macrostructural schema made up of story grammar elements, the order and emphasis of which are culturally and linguistically derived. At the sentence level, syntactical patterns feature the use of subordinate and relative clauses and other types of elaborated noun phrases to establish complexity. The word-level patterns consist of morphological knowledge, general academic words, and domain specific concepts. Alongside an integrated model of narrative-based academic language intervention, Dr. Spencer will present a cogent set of principles to guide differentiation for children with DLD. 

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will describe the science that supports the use of oral storytelling for language interventions.
2. Participants will define academic language and explain how their nesting is advantageous. 
3. Participants will learn how to tailor interventions for children with diverse language needs.

Dr. Spencer is a senior scientist and director of the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project at University of Kansas and holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Applied Behavioral Sciences, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, and Special Education. Drawing from speech-language pathology, applied linguistics, education, and behavior analysis, she concentrates her efforts on the oral academic language that serves as a foundation to the reading and writing of preK to 3rd grade students, with and without disabilities. She maintains a spirited research agenda that has yielded 70 peer review publications, 158 invited presentations, $15M in external funding, and several commercialized curricula, interventions, professional development systems, and assessment tools. Her multi-tiered interventions and assessment tools are used in several countries. Dr. Spencer values researcher-practitioner partnerships, community engagement, and cross disciplinary collaborations to accomplish high impact and innovative applied research.