How long should I target narrative retell before working on narrative generation? 🤔

This question came in response to my last post which answered the question:

Why should I target narrative retell before narrative generation?

If you haven't read that post, go check it out here before reading this rest of this 😉

The answer to THIS post is: it depends 😜

Well, what does it depend on? Let me give you a few things to consider.

⭐️ Primary goal

⭐️ Schema acquisition

Okay...so what does that mean? I got you!👇🏼👇🏼

⭐️ Primary goal | What is your primary goal? Retell? Generation? Comprehension? Do you care? Do you have a goal?

If your primary goal is retell, then you can spend however long you want on retell! If your goal is generation (which it almost always is for me), then I spend as long as it takes for the child to consistently retell a story with whatever story structure criteria I set (e.g., character, setting, problem, emotion, attempt, consequence/ending, end feeling). If your goal is comprehension (e.g., story comprehension questions), then retell is a great context for working on that! ⭐️

⭐️ Schema acquisition | Every kid is different. We all know that. However, if I'm mostly using retell to facilitate better generation, I use the same criteria from the previous point. I shift my focus to generation once the schema is consistently used independently or with little support.

🚨IMPORTANT🚨I am always probing narrative generation, even when primarily focusing on retell. For example, after doing a retell task about a child who gets hurt, I elicit a personal narrative about the same theme (e.g., "tell me about a time when YOU got hurt").

While generation is not my primary focus at the time, I'm able to note generalization of the schema & how much support it takes for the child to produce a personal narrative (which is another way you can determine when to shift your focus to generation).

There is no study that says you need to target retell before generation, so there is also nothing that will tell you exactly how long to focus on retell before moving to generation. It's all about dynamically evaluating & identifying the child's zone of proximal development (ZPD)!

What are your thoughts? Drop them below and let's chat! 👇🏼👇🏼