Nonstandardized Tasks
- Hypothetical
- Narrative
- Analog
- Direct   Observation

If you have not previously answered our Nonstandard-ized Task Use questionnaire, please click here.

Narrative tasks are self-initiated, self-controlled, extended form of discourse that occur in a variety of social contexts, for example story telling/retelling. Dealing with extended units of text reflects a child's ability to access multiple pieces of relevant information, which in turn enables them to perform higher level reasoning, critical thinking and problem solving. A key feature of narratives is recognition of the listener's perspective and needs in order to understand the message. As such, this task begins to resemble some of the real time demands of social situations. Narratives, specifically story telling, provide some experimental control over the context, but also leave open the occurrence of particular behaviors. The structure is somewhat reduced, distractions can increase, and processing demands may enlarge with memory, organizational, and integration requirements.

For references that describe these tasks, see:

• ASLP Researchers Study Key Storytelling Elements:
  http://www.media.wayne.edu/iws.back.issues/
  iws10_30_97/telling.html
• Hughes, McGillvrary, & Schmidek, M. (1997)
• Coggins, Friet, Morgan (1998)

Advantages:

• Narratives provide opportunities for children to produce sophisticated, abstract language in order to create a well-developed, cohesive, coherent account to a listener.
• Narratives preserve an element of spontaneity and creativity.

Limitations

• Transcribing and scoring narratives can be time consuming.
• Tasks are somewhat controlled, not providing challenges of real contextual demands.

Design Protocol:

• To assist you in developing your own Narrative Tasks, we have provided you with a design protocol. This protocol contains guidelines and examples for creating narratives for sampling social communication behaviors, and for scoring children's responses. Hopefully, this protocol will allow you to develop and implement narratives to assist in the assessment of children for whom you suspect social communication problems.

Video Segment

Narrative Tasks Video (41MB, Quick Time Movie)

This video segment illustrates a child (8;5, developing typically) producing an oral narrative for the book Frog, Where Are You? By Mercer Mayer (1969: New York, Dial Book for Young Readers). This story of a boy and his dog who go on a series of adventures to find their run-away frog is conveyed in the book via 24 pictures and no words. To narrate a story that is cohesive and coherent to a listener who cannot see the pictures, the narrator must indicate the temporal sequence of actions, describe which characters are doing which actions, and relate why they are engaging in these actions. To elicit an oral narrative, the clinician first introduces the book to the child and instructs him to look through the pictures, taking all the time needed, and to think about a story he could tell to go with the pictures. The child is then told, "Ok, tell me the best story you can think of" and allowed to flip through the book's pictures at his/her own pace to help remember the story. The child is also informed that the clinician will not be able to see the pictures, which encourages him to maximize the cohesion and coherence of his story.

A free download of QuickTime Player is available at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Hypothetical | Narrative | Analog | Direct Observation
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University of Washington, Dept. of Speech & Hearing Sciences, Tele-Collaboration Project. © 1999-2001, UW-SPHSC, including all photographs and images unless otherwise noted. Comments: tcollab@u.washington.edu