Nonstandardized Tasks
- Hypothetical
- Narrative
- Analog
- Direct   Observation

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Oral narrative elicitation is an assessment technique that falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum from naturalistic to contrived tasks. Oral narratives are naturally-occurring forms of extended discourse that happen spontaneously in everyday conversation (e.g., "A funny thing happened on my way here today…"), and are also elicited by others in both formal and informal situations (e.g. "What happened at school today?" vs. "Tell the class about the book you read."). Telling an oral narrative involves the recall and organization of events into a temporally and causally logical unit that takes into account the listener's level of knowledge about the events and characters. As such, oral narratives can be used to assess how well a child is able to produce and organize longer units of language than are required by most standardized tests, and also the extent to which the child is able to modify communication to accommodate the listener's perspective. The protocol that follows summarizes types of narratives and provides guidelines for designing and implementing narratives for clinical use; the emphasis here is on tasks that sample peer negotiation.

1. Various types of elicited oral narratives can be used to assess social communication. Story generation tasks involve asking the child to produce a novel narrative, for example about what happened during summer vacation. Story retell tasks involve telling the child a narrative (live or audio-taped), and then asking the child to retell the story he/she has just heard. Frequently, visual props are used such as finger puppets, video clips, or picture books, which the child can then use to assist memory while retelling the story. A child can be asked to tell the story from the perspective of different story characters, or to tell the story to various listeners, to determine whether they can alter their communication when addressing listeners unfamiliar with the story vs. listeners who were present for the child's first exposure to the narrative. Finally, the examiner might want to ask the child questions about facts and inferences from the story in order to assure that difficulty producing a narrative was not due to lack of comprehension of the story itself.
   
   
2. Oral narratives should be elicited in a quiet room. The child should be given time to think of a story, and should not be interrupted during narrative production. If necessary, the clinician can encourage the child to continue by saying "Mmm, hmm" or by repeating the child's last utterance with a question/rising intonation, e.g., "The dog fell out of the window?" If using a picture book to elicit the narrative, the clinician should sit so that the pictures are not visible, in order to encourage the child to verbalize all details rather than resort to pointing.
   
   
3. Audio-record the responses for later transcription and scoring.
   
   
4. The following measures are among those that can be used to score the narratives; these measures appear to tap linguistic behaviors that are important for social communication. Since normative data are not available, consider comparing the "child-at-risk" with a typically-developing peer as a way of determining a performance of concern.
   • Elements of story grammar (e.g,. introduction, resolution, etc.)
   • Length of the narrative (e.g., number of words, clauses, T-units, etc.)
   • Syntactic complexity (e.g., number of complex vs. simple clauses, variety of complex clause types, etc.)
   • Clear pronominal reference ties (e.g., number of clear, incomplete, and ambiguous ties)
   • Number of mental state words (e.g., think, know, believe, etc.)
   • Story cohesion (See Coggins, Friet, & Morgan, 1998.)
   • Story coherence (See Coggins, Friet, & Morgan, 1998.)
     
     
   You might wish to see Hughes, McGillivray, LaRae, & Schmidek (1997), and Nippold (1998) for additional ideas for using narratives in assessment.
   

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