Narrative language intervention with young adults can get complicated pretty fast, leaving therapists wondering how to intervene effectively. Join us as we take a deep dive into a case study with a young adult. Free downloadable resources for this age are available in the Free Resource Library.

—– Useful Links ——

Narrative Language Intervention: Interview with Douglas Petersen, Part 1 Ep. 23
Narrative Language Intervention: Interview with Douglas Petersen, Part 2 Ep. 24

Mike Rowe: The Way I Heard It podcast

War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars edited by Andrew Carroll

Referenced Free Library Resources
   Short story list
   Mental verbs
   Emotion verbs
   Mental verb bingo

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: And that’s why I finally saw that a lot of his problems came from not understanding the setting. It’s more than time and place, which is what we kind of use for our younger clients. Just the time and the place, but as your text gets more sophisticated, here’s a definition I love. Setting is an environment or surrounding in which an event or story takes place. Social conditions, historical time, geographical locations, weather, immediate surroundings, and timing are all different aspects of setting.

Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of thirty years. I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way I’ve worked long and hard to become a better therapist. Join me and I’ll do my best to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness. Joining me in the conversation is Dan, my technical wizard and office manager.

Dan: Before we started recording today, I noticed the title of today’s show, Narrative Intervention with Young Adults and was joking about how June must be Intervention Month, and Denise said every speech therapy is an intervention. Okay. I know the rest of our listeners are probably going. Yeah duh, Dan speech therapy is intervention, but I didn’t get that. What is the intervention of the week?

Denise: Since last week’s episode was on early intervention. I thought I’d go to the other end of the spectrum and talk about a young adult client I had.

Dan: Tell us about this client.

Denise: He was in his early twenties when he first came to our clinic. He had been adopted from Russia when he was around eight or nine years old. And he probably didn’t have much opportunity for learning while he was in the orphanage there. He had a diagnosis of dyslexia and also some ADHD. He wanted to improve his communication skills so that he could go to college. That was his goal. And at that point, his ability to decode when he read was really pretty good, thanks to his mom who’d worked with him a lot. But his comprehension was still poor. So his mom called me and wanted to know if I could help.

And I was like, sure, I can do that. I’ll do narrative language because narrative intervention fixes everything. So she said, let me get back to you. I gave her some places to go to check out narrative language. She called me back and says, I think that would work, it sounds really organic to me. So what she meant by organic was what Doug Peterson meant when he talked about contextualized, teaching something in context. Back when we had our Story Champs interview with Doug Peterson, he talked about narrative intervention being so effective because you don’t decontextualize it, you don’t take a skill out and teach it separate from something else. You’re teaching it in a story.

Dan: Right. And for those who are wanting to listen to that interview, that is episodes 23 and 24.

Denise: So basically I thought I can use something like Story Champs and even teach a young adult client, how to comprehend stories.

Dan: So once you’ve actually met with this young man, was it going to exactly as you expected?

Denise: No.

Dan: Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about it today.

Denise: I had a hard time finding the right intervention level. And, and where were the gaps happening? That was my challenge.

Dan: What do you mean by that?

Denise: Well, he pretty easily understood the basic story grammar format for an advanced story. So let me tell you what an advanced story has, that has complications. So in addition to our character or setting, or problem, the feeling, the action and the resolution, you throw in a complication right after that first action to solve a problem, because it didn’t work. Whatever problem the character has and they tried to solve it, it didn’t work the first time. And also you’ve got words, I call them plan words or another word for them as a mental verbs, which sounds really strange, but you’ve got an internal process going on in your head, right?

When you know something, you remember something, you think something, that brings the whole level of a narrative up a notch. So I like to explain it. Using J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. She wrote seven books, all about solving one main problem, defeating Voldemort, right? There was just complication after complication after complication, and a lot of events happening around all those complications.

Dan: These mental verbs as you call them, how do you teach those?

Denise: I have a little format I like to use with my clients, I’ll take them through, say, a movie that they’ve loved and they’ve enjoyed. And I talk about an emotion, a cause-and-effect word and the mental verb in a sentence. So for example, I might say Harry felt angry. That’s angry is the emotion word, because that’s the cause and effect word. He knew, that’s your mental verb, Uncle Dursley was keeping his letters from him. So that’s how you kind of work all that in, you know, a character feels something because of something, and you explain that by using the mental verb. Um, and here’s another one from the very first Avengers movie, you could talk about how Black Widow saved Hawkeye. Well, why did she do that? Because she knew that he was being controlled by Loki and she still liked him. She still valued him. And so you can get into some deeper things by explaining why a character acts a certain way because of what they know internally, what they remember.

Dan: But you’re saying none of this was a problem for him.

Denise: Right. Um, so he could retell a whole movie plot using this advanced structure, like if it was a Star Wars or something like that, and he could decode text at a pretty high level. But he didn’t comprehend high school text, so something was missing there.

Dan: Okay. So there’s a big difference between a visual movie plot and something that’s written, and that’s where he was getting tripped up. And that makes sense. What’d you do? How did you work with him to get that comprehension up?

Denise: Uh, honestly, I was still feeling my way when he came to the next session, so our second session, and whatever I had planned, I just threw it out the window because he said I got to have help with this paper. So he was going to a technical school and he needed to write a paper about why he chose the field he was going to go into.

And it turns out he had written a lot of words that said very little. It wasn’t the way he talked, when he talked, his expressive language is pretty good. He didn’t really talk in circles, but his writing was, it was kind of a mess. He didn’t understand how to use prepositions such as at, for, with, he used words like however, and also, but just kind of thrown in, not where they really belonged.

Um, so we needed to learn to write more like he talked, there’s this quote I heard on a micro podcast, The Way I Heard It. He was talking to a ghost writer who said, plain words put in plain order will do the job just fine. And many people have this feeling that the writing has to be elevated somehow. And that’s what he was trying to do, to make it more sophisticated. He was just messing it up.

Dan: We know that it’s harder than you think to craft a simple message and strip away everything that’s unnecessary. We’ve been writing these podcasts and the show notes and other things for our website, and it’s really challenging sometimes. Now I know that you help people that maybe I should get therapy from you.

Denise: Oh, it was a challenge for me too, but it was more of a challenge for this young man besides struggling to use plain words in plain order. Um, he was throwing in all these unnecessary words. I kept having to say to him, is that the way you would say it? So while I knew we needed to work on writing, I also knew we needed to work on comprehension of what he was reading, and so I thought short stories. We’re going to use short stories because they can be read fairly quickly, but you’ve got the whole narrative arc there. And that’s why I finally saw that a lot of his problems came from not understanding the setting.

Dan: Give me a definition of the setting, because I think it’s…

Denise: Yeah, it’s more than time and place, which is what we kind of use for our younger clients. Just the time and the place. But as your text gets more sophisticated, here’s a definition I love. Setting is an environment or surrounding in which an event or story takes place. Social conditions, historical time, geographical locations, weather, immediate surroundings, and timing are all different aspects of setting.

So think of the screen crawl and the music in Star Wars. Right away, you have a lot of information about that setting. I mean, what do you get when you’re sitting there, and you watch that screen crawl and you hear that music.

Dan: The very first thing, of course, ‘A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away,’ that tells you that nothing of this is going to be familiar to you, you just have to completely suspend everything.

Denise: And what does the music communicate?

Dan: Yeah, and it’s a very thematic, very dramatic, very martial… This is going to be a war situation. You know, we’ve got a lot of conflict here, but we have very noble causes that are going to be underneath all this.

Denise: Yes. And even the bold text on the black screen indicate some of that drama. Right?

Dan: Exactly.

Denise: So, you know, a whole lot right there.

Dan: And it’s in space because it’s on a star field background, yeah.

Denise: Authors have to convey all that without music or lighting or movement or the visualization. I discovered is not so hard with literature aimed at the younger readers.

I mean, like in the first Harry Potter book, It doesn’t take much inferencing to understand that Harry is not happy at the Dursleys. He’s not exactly abused, but he is neglected. His bedroom is in a cupboard under the stairs. Okay. So those initial setting ideas are a theme that’s carried throughout all the books, you know, even when he gets to move out of the cupboard, you still kind of know what that setting is at the Dursleys.

But when the text is at aimed at a higher level, more and more of that setting is implied. Social conditions are often implied. The mood of the story is almost, it’s just implied through the vocabulary. Here’s a couple examples. So we were reading a story where there was a reference to someone wearing a Trilby hat. Okay. Right away that places the reader in the late 1800s,, early 1900s, probably in Britain, if you know that. But his mind looked at that, he read it as tricorner hat.

Dan: Which is a totally different era and location.

Denise: That places as a reader in late 1700s in colonial America. He got so lost, he couldn’t figure out where the story was going because his mind saw that trilby as tricorner and all of a sudden he was like trying to make all sorts of inferences.

Dan: Yeah. How would you pick that up if you didn’t have that historical context? Wow. As I was reading the show notes for this this morning, getting ready for this I thought, how did I ever pick up on that context of when, uh, a particular hat style would be as opposed to a bowler hat or…

Denise: well, you see, there were other clues at the beginning of that, but he was so focused on trying, sometimes you just find one word that give him the clue to everything that he could ignore other things.

I mean, so good readers were taking all of the clues in, or almost all of them. We can, we can miss a few, right?

Dan: Right, but he was looking for the one key to the whole thing.

Denise: That’s one, that’s my key. It has to be the tricorner hat, and everything else just wasn’t considered. Here’s another example. So one of Ray Bradbury’s stories, All Summer in a Day, takes place on Venus. But he only mentions Venus once and, and my client missed that one reference. And then he was struggling to understand the setting of the story, which influences everything that happens. The Most Dangerous Game. Great story, by the way, for young adults, only mentions the word yacht one time in the first several lines, but all the rest of the language implies the characters on a boat from the very beginning of the story, there’s talk about sailors, islands, et cetera. And the thing is, a competent reader would know the characters were on a boat before yacht was even mentioned. So that word yacht is almost written as an afterthought. Listen to these beginning lines and, and this is some dialogue from two characters. “Off there to the right somewhere is a large island” said Whitney. “It’s rather a mystery.””What island is it?” Rainsford asked. “The old charts call it Ship Trap Island,” Whitney replied. “A suggestive name, isn’t it? Sailors have a curious dread of the place, I don’t know why, some superstition.” Yeah, you already know where the characters are, right?

Dan: Exactly you, you can’t be looking at an island if you’re on land.

Denise: And yacht comes in the next line, but if you’re an experienced reader, you hardly need that. You already know where they are, right? So he needed help figuring out settings. When you’re reading stories like this, you can miss some details and still get the gist of a story, but you cannot miss these essential details. At the very beginning, they set the setting for you and good readers seem to know what to pay attention to.

Dan: Is vocabulary affecting this, just not knowing enough words?

Denise: Yes, that played into it. Um, his vocabulary was low for words that tell you about mood, what kinds of words are ominous, give you an ominous feeling, what ones indicate that something is mischievous, that this is going to be a fun, light, mischievous story.

What ones are cheerful? What ones are tragic? We worked a lot on taking setting words and categorizing them according to mood. And by the way, his way of looking up words, when he first came to me, so inefficient, he would just Google the word. And then he would just kind of read where it came up. Well, if you don’t get a word from the context, from a context that’s not even related to what you’re doing. So I showed him dictionary.com. He was like, wow, this exists.

Dan: And that’s, that’s actually kind of funny because as I was reading through this, I actually had to look up about six of the words that you had in the show notes here to find out what they were. So yeah, you still have to do it folks, sorry.

Denise: Yep. And he started doing that, to his credit. He started looking up words using an online dictionary.

Dan: What else did you work on?

Denise: We worked on the themes of the story. We worked on the themes of the stories, and I call these the big ideas, that seemed to make more sense to him than theme. They were hard for him to extrapolate or to pull from a story. We had to just keep working on them, and the key was to read lots of stories and get lots of practice because big ideas, the themes, are never stated outright.

Dan: Well, how do you find a theme or a big idea? I mean, that’s the whole point, I remember having to dig into this all through school, trying to, you know, getting lectured by the teachers no, look deeper. What’s the theme? I’m like, I don’t know!

Denise: Well, well, that’s a good question, and I eventually figured it out. You ask questions about their emotional reaction to the story. Did you like that character? Why, why not? Did you think a certain thing was going to happen? Well, why? See, if you can answer that, then you can talk about foreshadowing, or why you like the character, why you didn’t like a character. Did you like Hawkeye going back to the Avengers? Do you like Hawkeye even though he was, seemed like a traitor? But no yes, you did. Well, why? Well, because you know, you just start going from there or why do you feel that way about this story.

Well, here’s another example from a story we read, he liked the Walter Mitty story. And so we got into, well, you know, what do you feel about Walter Mitty? Are you a little bit impatient with him? Yeah. Well, why? Eventually that led to the theme that we’re our own worst enemies, but do you still sympathize with Walter Mitty? Well, why? Well, that leads to the thing we can empathize with imperfect characters. Yeah, so you can get some deep stuff there.

Dan: I’d never thought of looking at theme that way. Cool. How did you help him develop this?

Denise: Well, we wrote in two different directions, he would write essays about the themes of the story, and then highlight the heck out of a the stories I would print off. So, so a thing called close reading is when you say something about a story that you’ve read or an article, well, where’s your text to support it, find that, get your highlighter and find those words that the author wrote that support, what you have to say.

Dan: Oh, so you can start making those connections.

Denise: And so, I mean, you’re writing an essay, you have to have to support what you say. Okay. But the other thing is he started writing personal memories with the theme he took from Walter Mitty. Right? Like we’re our own worst enemies? We’d ask him well, has anything like that ever happened to you? Have you ever experienced that? Well, write about it.

Dan: And so then he would start taking some of those things that he was seeing in other people’s writing and move and change and incorporate it into his own.

Denise: Well, the themes, least that was the hope. I mean, the themes are universal. So my AP English teacher called them universal ideas. These themes, these big ideas, right. They applied to us universally. Everyone has been their own worst enemy at some time. Right. Or something like that. So it’s like the Story Champs process on a very high level, because of with Story Champs, you take them through these little stories that they already have illustrated. And then you ask the kid, well, has anything ever happened to you right now? Of course, they’re telling a very simple story, but it’s a personal connection.

Dan: Okay, but what about non-fiction writing and reading? Because that’s very different.

Denise: Oh, and it’s harder. Nonfiction is so much harder. I tried the Wall Street Journal first, that was too advanced for him. So I just started getting news articles off the internet that applied to his interests. And that actually would be a whole nother podcast to talk about in the non-fiction work we did, but I just want listeners to know yeah, we didn’t ignore nonfiction, but today I’m just going to talk about the fiction.

Dan: Well, what were the results?

Denise: Well, there are four main things I want to talk about. He became so interested in language itself. There is a short story we were reading called The Open Window. Now that was written in the late 1800s, early 1900s. The author has this really kind of delightful, little bit sarcastic tone to his writing. And he says, these words, these words are more interesting than what we read nowadays, which is actually true. And I said, well, you knew what you might like War Letters. Do you remember the book War Letters?

Dan: That’s a beautiful book. His goal was to preserve these letters that people have, that they’ve passed down in their families from revolutionary time, all the way through the Gulf War.

Denise: But what really we noticed as we were, because we listened to it on audio. It’s how the language changed, and we notice how much more eloquent the language was, regardless of the education to the writer. The language was more elegant the further back you went, especially in the early 1900s and on it was not as eloquent. I said he might like War Letters. Well, to my surprise, he ordered it on Amazon. He came in the next time, he said, man, I can’t put this down. I’m staying up past midnight, reading this.

Perfect for him because, kind of has a short attention span. Remember the ADHD plus the comprehension. Now he’s still working through all that, but each little chapter is kind of… Each letter is like its own little chapter. All you have to do is read one letter and you’ve got the whole little story there.

He was really getting into some of this. I mean, there is this one exchange of letters between a soldier and the young lady he’s after, young lady is not interested in the soldier, she’s trying to nicely say no, go away. And he was just dying and he says, oh, he’s so stupid, man. He’s so stupid. He doesn’t get it. She doesn’t want him. Totally, he related to that, and this was Civil War era. So he comprehended enough that he kept on going through the book and he would highlight things he didn’t understand. He’d bring the book to therapy and said, I didn’t understand this.

Dan: Oh, that’s great.

Denise: Yeah, that was great. He started to be able to extrapolate themes himself, like I already said with Walter Mitty, you know, he figured that out. He was able to draw that theme himself out of the story. It just was so funny, when he would realize a main theme, he would get this amazing look on his face. He’d make a sound effect and go ‘mind blown’, like… (makes funny noise)

Mind blown, because it was just such a revelation to him. He got really interested in thinking about themes, which relates to all of everyday life.

Dan: And once you start seeing those things, then you start to see them everywhere.

Denise: And just the look on his face was priceless. Wow. I can’t believe that. Here’s another interesting thing that happened, so he did take a job in the computer industry. Right after he started it, he came to a therapy session and he was so upset. He was so rattled and he had these instructions of what he was supposed to do on the job. And he said, I didn’t know what to do. And I just read this on. I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand it.

So I want to step back a moment and just see if you remember a friend of ours who plays the piano very, very well. She told me, when I get nervous the notes just float in front of my eyes and I can’t really read them, you know.

Dan: The more anxiety you get, the more things just slip away. That’s the way it feels like to me, those things just go beyond my grasp. Why can’t we just hang onto it?

Denise: Well, that was the kind of experience he was having because he, he could read that level of texts, those instructions. And I said, okay, get out your highlighter. Let’s highlight exactly what step you were supposed to do first, what you’re supposed to do next, take away all that extraneous text.

And he calmed right down after he had been working on that for about five minutes. It’s like, oh yeah, I can do this. I can read this, cause I keep that in my letter in my truck. You can do this, but he just, he was so rattled and it was just really disconcerting for him. Of course, they didn’t want to talk about. Because remember his goal at first was to prepare to go to college. And he didn’t do that at that time. And I did take a sample of his writing to my aunt who teaches freshmen English at a university. And she said it was on level with other beginning freshmen writing. So I was like, yay, you’re making progress .

But the thing was, and he admitted this himself, that he could dive into something really intensely for two or three weeks and then just totally drop it. And then dive back in. I was like you know, I never said don’t go to college. I just said, you’d have to be more consistent if you really want to go to college. But do you know, not everyone has to go to college, right? You are where you are and you can continue to learn. But what is really interesting and I think maybe this is the best change, maybe better than going to college, his mother said that his brothers found him more interesting to talk to.

That’s an interesting observation.

It’s got ideas to talk about. He sees themes and things and he’s going deeper. So better family relations.

Dan: Yeah. Which is, you know, those interpersonal relations are very important. Yeah. That the goal of college was gone. How did you decide that he was finished?

Denise: He started working and that was interfering with his ability to make it to therapy. So basically that kind of ended it, but I prescribed a home program for him to continue learning. You know, at some point you need to let go and I thought, well, we’ve done a lot. You know, it’s time for him to take some of this on himself. Some of this responsibility.

Dan: And you saw that. that he was doing that already.

Denise: So, yeah. So I said, you need to write in your journal every day, even it was just a little bit. Those personal experiences. You need to read and read and read every day. And I was just hoping he could find something as interesting as War Letters to keep him going.

And I said, you need to listen to some podcasts a couple of times a week, so you can absorb this high level language. So I introduced him to micro podcast. The way I heard it, you know, micro says short, uh, for the curious mind-

Dan: The curious mind with a short attention span.

Denise: And that fit him to a T.

Dan: It fits a lot of us to a T, and I think that’s why it’s so popular.

Denise: I introduced him to some history podcasts. He’d loved history and he’s driving a lot for work anyway, I said, listen to these, just absorb the language.

Dan: Yeah, that’s a wonderful thing because there’s so much you can do in the car with listening to things. That’s a brilliant idea.

Denise: Not everyone has to go to college, as I already said, but everyone with the right tools can make learning life-long. And he did email me later and said he was continuing to write personal stories.

Dan: Excellent. So of all the stories that you read with him, what was his favorite?

Denise: Oh, by far it was The Most Dangerous Game. That blew his mind in several directions, as it does most people who read it.

Dan: It is a rather shocking story.

Denise: He just loved it. That the adventure and the surprise. Yeah.

Dan: How did you choose the stories that you used?

Denise: Well, this is interesting. I was a nerdy young girl when I was in junior high and high school, just a total bookworm, my parent’s anthologies of short stories. There are college textbooks that were just collections of short stories.

I read them and read them and read them. And my seventh grade social studies teacher, Mr. Reeves. I still remember he called me to his desk one day and said, here, I want to give you these. He gave me a collection of short stories, plays, poems, which I still have to this day, I felt kind of invisible back then.

And he saw me, he saw something that would mean something to me. They were his, they were used. And so I devoured those of course. So when it came time for short stories and I wanted the older short stories, because there’s something about them, better written, better vocabulary, more interesting. I don’t know what it is, but I had this whole repertoire in my mind. And they’re old enough to be out of copyright, I could print them out without worrying about copyright and we could highlight the heck out of them like I said, and I have a list of them in the free resource library in case anyone wants to use an approach like this because I come across some that were duds.

Like I thought The Necklace, that famous story about… do you know the story, The Necklace? Oh, anyway, I went back and read it and the whole, it takes like a whole page to even get to any action. A whole page of very dense words about the setting. I thought that’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna work for me anymore.

You know, a couple of stories like that you think are going to be classic. No, it doesn’t work. So I do have them at SLP proadvisor.com/free. I have actually several freebies to go with this podcast. I’ve got the list of short stories that I’ve found to really work for this approach. I’ve got a list of mental verbs that are really high level and emotion words that are really those higher level vocabulary words.

Dan: And the bingo game.

Denise: And yes, and I’ve got the, um, mental verb bingo game.

Dan: This has been a fascinating one for me, but I think the important thing to remember in this is to…

Denise: When you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. In this case, mastering the simple is figuring out, oh, it’s the setting. Not totally, but by and large, it’s the setting. That’s the very first thing master that, the rest of the story is going to make sense.

Dan: Excellent. Thank you very much for listening this week. We’ll be back next week with another topic. So we’ll talk to you then.

Thanks for listening to The Mindful SLP. We invite you to sign up for our free resource library at slpproadvisor.com slash free. You’ll get access to some of Denise’s best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at SLP proadvisor.com/free.

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