University Center for the Development of Language and Literacy (UCLL)
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Background of Social Language Stories
by Holly Craig, Ph.D. CCC-SLP Specialized stories to help in the development of language skills were first proposed in 1975 by a team of language researchers working at Northwestern University, and funded by a grant from the federal government. The stories were written, tested, and re-written over a three year process, and I was privileged to be part of that team! The idea behind the stories is that joint story telling is an important part of children’s language and literacy development, and they are fun! If stories are written to emphasize language forms at the developmental level of the child, and if children can be encouraged to engage in joint story telling through verbal responding, better language skills can develop. One outcome of the Northwestern University project was an important book for clinicians which described the story telling techniques. The book provided 25 stories for children developing their very first one and two word phrases, and another 25 for children developing longer sentences. Although the book is out of date now, a few copies can still be found here. The full cite for the book is: Lee, L., Koenigsknecht, R., & Mulhern, S. (1975). Interactive Language Development Teaching: The Clinical Presentation of Grammatical Structure. Evanston Il., Northwestern University Press. Since that time, students training to become speech-language pathologists are routinely taught how to write and use these specialized stories for children with language problems. Often now these stories are called “social stories,” “scripts,” or “routines” because the stories have changed from focusing almost exclusively on the development of grammatical sentence forms as they did in the early days, to focusing on social forms of language as well. For example, now words like “yes,” “no,” “hi,” thank you,” and “please” are encouraged. Now shorter but still appropriate responses are accepted and are considered to be part of the developmental learning process. So, please continue with the tutorial on social language stories. We are delighted to share this technique with you! |
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