Narrative language
samples help education professionals address individual students' communication issues.
Narrative language testing analyzes a child's ability to speak or write a cohesive and coherent narrative explaining a simple story or process. Speech therapists and language specialists use narrative language samples to analyze individual children's unique idiolects, or personal communication styles. Upon identifying a child's idiolect, speech therapists can then prescribe specific, targeted instructional suggestions to aid in the development and correction of that child's communication issues.
Context in Curriculum
One of the greatest benefits of having children produce narrative language samples is the ability to use this to then blend language instruction in with other elements of a child's curriculum. Not only can this exercise work toward improving a child's language skills, it can also reinforce material from other classes: For example, children could produce a narrative that relates to their science courses, explaining how cells form and how they die. However, if this exercise is matched too closely with one or a few other disciplines, it may adversely affect a student's comfort with connected materials by causing the child to associate them with his or her language production difficulties.
Errors in Context
Proponents of narrative language testing argue that samples reveal contextualized speaking and writing errors, whereas traditional testing methods reveal only assessment-based errors. Consequently, narrative language samples are believed to more accurately reflect the natural speaking and writing habits of an individual child, thus revealing those errors and issues that are native to the child. These errors, however, only relate to the child's ability to use the narrative form of expression, and consequently do not provide much valid information about other forms of spoken and written expression such as argument or analysis.
Naturalness of Process
While narrative language advocates maintain that the production and analysis of samples allows children to engage in a wholly natural communication process, many critics point to the fact that the narrative is a predominately Westernized communication process. Consequently, while producing a narrative language sample might be completely natural to a Westernized child who was born and raised in Europe or America, it might be a foreign or confusing communicative form for a child born in a non-Western society.
Specificity to the Child
Narrative language samples provide specific data relating to an individual child's communication issues. While speech therapists and communication specialists identify this as an overwhelming benefit, teachers unable to assist and instruct a multitude of speakers and writers, each with his or her own specific issues, might be overwhelmed by the copious amounts of data that narrative language samples produce. Consequently, the practice's greatest benefit for some professionals, might also be its most potentially overwhelming detriment.
