One of my jobs as a speech and language therapist is to work out how and why children may be struggling to communicate. Recently, I’ve noticed an increasing difficulty children are having with narrative skills.
This is worrying because narrative skills are so very important and have been for millennia. Sharing narratives and storytelling is universal to the human experience, common across all cultures. There is a theory that storytelling developed not long after the development of language itself.
Stories allow us to share information in a memorable way, which might have helped our ancestors cooperate and survive. By telling a story rather than merely reciting dry facts, we remember the details more clearly.[1]
Narrative and Writing
In the modern world, narrative skills retain this importance for communication and for academic success. Multiple studies have found a direct link between young children’s ability to retell a simple story and their later academic outcomes. For example, one study found the ability of six year olds to retell a story was directly linked with their writing skills at age eleven.
Without the ability to verbalise a clear narrative, children will struggle to write in a coherent and organised way, and may also struggle to understand narratives they hear or read. These skills are fundamental for learning and literacy, to help us organise our thinking and connect different ideas.
Spoken narrative skills are foundational skills for writing.
Narrative and Communication
They are also crucial aspects of communication, allowing us to share our thoughts, experiences and feelings. We share personal narratives as part of our social interaction day to day to describe and explain what is going on in our lives, to get to know each other and to see others’ perspectives, e.g.
Talking about what happened at the weekend - ‘last weekend we…’
Talking about future events - ‘ I am so looking forward to Christmas because we are…’
Explaining sequences of activity - ‘tomorrow is our party, first we’re going to…’
Telling a teacher about an incident at playtime - ‘we were in the playground when…’
Retelling a story – ‘the story was about a boy who found some magic beans…first…’
Having conversations with peers – ‘yesterday I went to see the Rovers play…’
Identifying children who struggle with narrative skills
Some children may do reasonably well at sentence level, though narrative can be extra challenging for them. You might see some of the following features:
Often, children will not ‘set the scene’ in their narratives – as a listener, you may find yourself feeling lost and unsure about the context.
They may jump around when sharing narratives, not following the sequence of events.
They may lose track as they are talking, resulting in events sounding confused or contradictory.
They may have a tendency to use short sentences, maybe joined with ‘and’, resulting in narratives sounding more like a list than a story.
They may use limited vocabulary, use lots of ‘empty’ words, like ‘this, thingy, that’ or make heavy use of a core set of words.
They may be able to talk about things in the ‘here and now’ but struggle with retelling or telling past events, describing or explaining future events or plans.
Components of Narrative
Narratives are complex because so many components are needed to do them well:
They need a clear overall structure – elements known as ‘story grammar categories’ or the macrostructure. This is the overall structure of the narrative; the scene setting elements, followed by episodes or events and ending with conclusions or resolutions.
They also need key elements at sentence level (the microstructure) - rich and varied vocabulary, useful story vocabulary, such as connectives (and, then, so) or temporal language (first, next, then) etc. They need relevant grammar and syntax, language to describe and explain as well as higher order language skills for older children, such as reasoning, inferring, hypothesising or justifying.
A recent research study looking at narrative development in typically developing children as well as those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) identified key areas where support was needed for those children who struggle.[2]
They found children benefited from work with the broader structure of narratives (the macrostructure), at sentence and vocabulary level (the microstructure) and in promoting general language growth.
Some useful strategies
We know that children with poor narrative skills may have difficulty in decoding and understanding text beyond the sentence, in using complex grammar and conveying ideas effectively. Focusing on development of narrative skills can support these skills, and ultimately impact on improved writing.
Some children might need practice sequencing familiar events and retelling the simple sequence to support the idea of narrative
Try to make narrative structures explicit and give separate and explicit instruction for each of the components. This may include explicitly teaching some of the structural components of narrative – words and concepts, such as ‘who, when and where’ to set the scene, ‘what happened’ to share events and ‘the end’ to help conclude the narrative
Use visual support with symbols to support this understanding
Teach connective language – conjunctions, such as ‘and’, ‘because’, ‘so’, ‘then’, etc.
Teach the language of time to help with the flow and sequencing of narratives – such as first, next, last
Give great models for retelling narratives, building on what the children are saying – e.g. so you’re telling me you were in the park with your mum, then you saw a squirrel climbing up a tree….etc.
Share stories
Encourage children to share /retell stories they enjoy
Use visual talking or writing frames with clear narrative structure to help with writing – putting visual reminders on pupils’ desks as a reference point to help with planning and revising of plans can be extremely helpful.
We’ve done some work on translating the research mentioned above into some simple resources to help with our work, which we’re happy to share.
We’d love to know whether you have noticed children struggling with narrative and the strategies you have found effective to support these really important skills.
[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/storytelling-x/
[2] Leitão, S., Claessen, M., Visentin, D., & Calder, S. D. (2025). Narrative production in English speaking children aged 5–7 years with typical language development and developmental language disorder: Development of a reference data set. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2025.2536816