The power of stories: Facilitating social communication in children with limited language abilities

Children with limited language expression and comprehension abilities are at risk for academic failure, particularly in literacy acquisition. In addition, these children often have poor social outcomes, including difficulty forming friendships, social exclusion, withdrawal, and victimization. The academic and social difficulties that these children experience are associated with their poor language processing skills, limited conversational ability, and weak social and emotional knowledge. A social communication approach utilizing children's literature is suggested as one approach to address these three areas simultaneously. This approach involves sharing books with a strong story structure, rich social and emotional content, and engaging illustrations. Flexible scripts are created to guide interventionists to elicit the production of complex sentence structures, highlight conversational cooperation, and facilitate emotion understanding. To provide continuity of instruction, these bibliotherapeutic procedures can be implemented by special service providers in intervention sessions as well as by teachers in general classroom activities.