Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists know much more about children's development of fictional narratives than they do about children's development of personal narratives and the role these personal narratives play in academic success, social-emotional development, and self-regulation. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide clinicians with strategies for assessing and developing children's and adolescents' personal narratives.

Method: This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) the development of autobiographical event narratives and life stories, (b) factors that contribute to development of these genres, (c) the importance of these genres for the development of sense of self-identity and self-regulation, (d) deficits in personal narrative genres, and (e) strategies for eliciting and assessing event narratives and life stories.

Curriculum-based emergent literacy assessment in early childhood.

Speech-language pathologists who work in early childhood settings are concerned with monitoring and evaluating progress and making appropriate instructional adjustments to promote at-risk children's language and literacy development. Curriculum-based assessment can be effective in providing practitioners with this type of information. This article discusses processes and procedures for implementing curriculum-based assessment and suggests methods that professionals can use to teach assessment tasks to children who struggle with the task demands.

Quantitative and qualitative documentation of early literacy instruction.

Quantitative and qualitative procedures were used in this pilot study to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a language and literacy instruction model for meeting the needs of children with impairments, delays, and differences in regular Head Start classrooms. Although the project addresses a variety of literacy domains, this article focuses on rhyming and letter naming. In the instruction model, children were exposed to motivating examples of rhyme and letter targets in different activity structures embedded across the curriculum.