Abstract
Petersen, D. B., & Spencer, T. D. (2010). Narrative Language Measures. Retrieved from http://www.languagedynamicsgroup.com November 20, 2012.
Common Core Standards require that students develop proficiency in oral and written narratives in elementary school. Studies have shown that narrative interventions carried out by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are effective in improving both the macrostructure (organization) and microstructure (vocabulary and syntax) aspects of narrative discourse (Petersen, 2010; Petersen, Gillam, Spencer, & Gillam, 2010). Monitoring progress in narrative skills can be time consuming for SLPs because typically they must transcribe the narrative samples. Petersen and Spencer have provided materials that can make the task of progress monitoring relatively easy – and the majority of the materials can be downloaded for free at the website: http://www.languagedynamicsgroup.com
The Narrative Language Measures (NLM) were designed to represent the construct of narrative language. NLM stories are based on personal narrative themes that reflect realistic situations many children have experienced and include narrative features common in typical children’s stories. The NLM is comprised of three subtests:
Test of Story Comprehension (TSC) for preschool children or children with limited expressive narrative discourse
Test of Narrative Retell (TNR) for preschool through third grade children
Test of Personal Generation (TPG) for preschool through third grade children
The NLM stories highlight events that young children are likely to experience in their daily lives (e.g., getting hurt, losing something). The NLM includes standard administration protocols for eliciting narrative retells, personal stories, and story comprehension. Each subtest is scripted for consistent administration, with detailed information on acceptable examiner prompts. The standardized NLM scoring rubrics consists of 0–2 or 0–3 point ratings for two critical subscales—story grammar and language complexity. Scoring for narrative comprehension and organization is based on elements often referred to as story grammar. Story grammar includes expected features of a story, such as the description of a setting, a problem, attempts to solve the problem, and the consequence. When combined, these key features of a story are called episodes (plots). Narrative discourse employs greater syntactic complexity (more dependent clauses) than conversational discourse. Syntactic language complexity is evaluated in the NLM according to the degree to which more complex and meaningful structures are present.
In the TSC, there are 40 stories. The TSC is appropriate for younger children and children with extremely limited language skills because it requires less expressive language skills than the other narrative tasks. An examiner reads a story to a child and asks factual and inferential questions about the story. The questions tap each story grammar component (characters, the problem, feelings about the problem, how the character fixed the problem, the consequence of what the character did, and the character’s feelings at the end of the story). The SLP can use a mean of 3 stories for benchmarking at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, and use other stories periodically throughout the year for progress monitoring. With the TSC, examiners write children’s responses to questions, which can be scored easily in real time, following administration, or after listening to an audio recording of responses.
The TNR involves reading a model story to a child and then asking the child to retell that story. There are 9 stories for benchmarking and 16 for progress monitoring for each grade, preschool through third grade. Students earn points for including story grammar elements and connective words (e.g., because, then, when, after, if) that were used in the stories. They can earn additional points for including elements that contribute to episodic structure. The SLP can use the mean score of 3 stories from the benchmarking sets at the beginning, middle, and end of the year to document levels of performance. Periodically during the year, retelling stories from the progress monitoring sets can be used to document changes in narrative discourse. With the TNR, children’s retells can be scored in real time or audio recorded for later scoring.
The TPG involves telling a model story to a child and then asking the child to tell his or her own personal story that is thematically related. There are 40 TPG stories for preschool children and 25 for K-third grade. Personal narratives from the TPG subtest can be elicited immediately after a child retells a TNR story by asking if a problem similar to the modeled story had ever happened to him or her. TPG subtests can also be administered using a conversation elicitation procedure in which the examiner shares three stories (one at a time during a conversation) and asks the child if something similar had ever happened to him or her. The TPG stories are scored using a rubric. Students earned 0-3 points for information in each of the following categories: setting, problem, emotional state, action, consequence, ending emotion. They can also earn points for use of dialogue, causal/adversative/temporal markers, and unique adjectives or adverbs. Children’s personal story generations are typically scored from a transcribed recording.
Administration for each NLM subtest takes approximately 2–5 minutes and the TNR and TSC subtests can be scored in real time while the child is narrating. This is of critical importance to clinicians who may not have time to record and transcribe language samples before calculating scores. The TSC, TNR, and TPG can all be downloaded for free. There is a small charge for optional supplemental pictures that can be used with the preschool TSC and TNR. The NLM is a well thought-out and easy to use system for monitoring progress in narrative discourse.