Narrative Intervention for Building Social-Emotional Skills and Self-Regulation in Children and Adolescents: Going Beyond Language and Literacy

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Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL, ASDCS Related seminars and products

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Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL, ASDCS, is an internationally-renowned expert on play assessment and development in children. She is the developer of the renowned Westby Symbolic Play Scale, a research-based scale used to assess children's social and play skills. Dr. Westby has written and implemented projects to support personnel preparation, clinical service, and research, including Project PLAY (Play and Language Attunement in Young Children), that trains caregivers to increase the development of play, theory of mind, and language.

Dr. Westby is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), is Board-Certified in Child Language and Literacy Disorders, and has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Geneva College and the University of Iowa's Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, the ASHA Award for Contributions to Multicultural Affairs, the Honors of ASHA, and the Kleffner Lifetime Clinical Career Award.

Dr. Westby has published and presented nationally and internationally on topics including play, autobiographical memory, theory of mind, language-literacy relationships, narrative/expository development and facilitation, adverse childhood experiences, screen time, trauma, metacognition/executive function, and assessment and intervention with culturally/linguistically diverse populations. She has consulted with the New Mexico Preschool for the Deaf, which employs a play-based curriculum.

Dr. Westby has been a visiting professor at Flinders University in South Australia where she worked on a language/literacy curriculum, and at Brigham Young University where she consulted on SEEL, a systematic and engaging emergent literacy program that employs playful practice. She is a consultant for Bilingual Multicultural Services in Albuquerque, NM and holds an affiliated appointment in communication disorders at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. Dr. Westby is certified as an Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinical Specialist (ASDCS).

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Carol Westby has employment relationships with Brigham Young University and Bilingual Multicultural Services. She receives royalties as a published author. Carol Westby receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Carol Westby is a member of American Board of Child Language and Language Disorders.

Objectives

1. Summarize the development of autobiographical/personal stories, fictional stories and life story narratives.
2. Articulate the role of autobiographical/personal stories, fictional stories and life stories in academic and social success.
3. Correlate the ways culture influences structure and content of autobiographical and fictional narratives.
4. Select and use appropriate tools to assess fictional and autobiographical/life story personal narratives, considering cultural influences.
5. Use children’s and adolescent’s literature to promote development of personal narratives and life stories.
6. Develop students’ ability to make inferences by relating emotions and mental states to events.
7. Facilitate students’ recognition and production of characterization, plot and theme in fictional stories, autobiographical narratives and life stories.

Outline

Narrative Intervention: Overview

• Types and their roles and functions
  • Fictional
  • Personal/autobiographical
  • Life stories
• Common Core curriculum and social skills
• Cultural variations

Narrative Intervention to Promote

• Social-emotional skills
• Self-regulation
• Self-identity
• Self-determination
• Problem-solving

Narrative Assessments

• Fictional narratives
  • Elicit through stimuli varying in cognitive and linguistic task demands
• Personal narratives
  • Prompts to elicit and rubrics to evaluate
• Life stories
  • Interviewing strategies to elicit and rubrics to evaluate types of coherence
• Narrative microstructures and macrostructures
  • Vocabulary for thoughts and feelings
  • (Theory of Mind) and complex syntax
  • Structure, content/plot/theme and coherence

Strategies to Develop Autobiographical Memory and Personal Narratives

• Reminiscing that promotes autobiographical memory
• Using children’s books to trigger reminiscing
• Elements and influences of settings on stories
• Identify and build narrative plots
• Developing landscape of consciousness (Theory of Mind)
  • Making connections between emotions/mental states and actions
  • Developing vocabulary and syntax to express connections between mental/emotional states and behaviors/events
• Support-making narrative inferences
  • Question-answer relationships – from literal to inferential
  • Levels of language abstraction – from contextualized to decontextualized language
• Promote problem-solving and self-regulation

Strategies to Develop Life Stories

• Role of characterization in life stories
  • Physical and psychological traits/characteristics – identifying relationships between character traits and character behaviors and narrative events
  • Use biographies/autobiographies to understand characterization
  • Character transformation: life turning points
• Identify and develop themes
• Support making narrative inferences
  • Think alouds
  • Questioning the author
• Facilitate life stories to develop self-identity and self-regulation

Target Audience

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