Essay On Narrative Development

Narration is a form of discourse that describes a series of event. In its full form, it includes orientation (setting, participants), initiating event, and internal response by the protagonist, consequence, eventual resolution and evaluation. Narrative performance has been successfully used to discriminate language abilities in children with language impairment and children with learning disabilities from children with normally-developing communication skills (Blood & Seider, 1981; Bloodstein, 1987; Byrd & Cooper, 1989; Kline & Starkweather, 1979). The ability to narrate a story is fundamental to the development of overall communicative competence and involves the coordination of a variety of knowledge structures and linguistic abilities. One reason for narrative skills to be an integral part of language development is that it plays a critical role in skills underlying successful school achievement, including reading and writing (Snow, 1983; Snow & Dickinson, 1990; Watson, 1989).They have high ecological validity and it provides a test of language content form and use (Liles, 1993).
Research studies investigating the narrative development in English, Hebraic and Spanish speakers have found that the onset of narrative abilities seem to occur at three years of age. Between three and five years of age, children progress from object description and temporal sequences of relevant actions to the solution of problems toward the target question (Chapell, 1980). Between six and ten years of age, children start to produce narratives that express the character's mental states, feelings and thoughts. Some studies have suggested that the development of narrative abilities reaches its highest level of complexity around ten years of age....

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...rtant clinical implication of the present study is to examine each child on a case-by-case basis and to incorporate narrative assessment into diagnostic evaluations with both stuttering and non stuttering school-age children. Given the importance of narrative ability for academic and social success, any problems identified should be addressed throughout the intervention process.
Conclusion
Very often the assessment of narrative abilities in children with stuttering tends to get overlooked. Narration is a domain where children with stuttering tend to fall behind their TD counterparts, not only narrative skills index the communicative competence and academic achievement in stuttering but also it acts as a strong prognostic indicator. So working on the narrative skills in children with stuttering will go a long way in strengthening their communicative ability.