Despite evidence that early narrative abilities are predictive of school-age literacy skills and academic achievement, only limited progress has been made in understanding how these narrative skills can be promoted. One theoretical framework that discusses the contextual conditions which are especially crucial for learning to take place is dynamic systems theory (Nelson et al., 2001; Thelen & Smith, 2006) which emphasizes the nonlinear dynamic convergence of multiple aspects. It has been suggested that cognitive, perceptual, motor, social, emotional, motivational, structural challenges, dialogic patterns, and current neural network conditions must all reach threshold levels of convergence to support advances in language (Nelson & Arkenberg, 2008). The current chapter utilizes this framework to provide a detailed account of the mechanisms that support advances in narrative skills in early childhood through adolescence. The detailed account of the eight stages of narrative development incorporates prior descriptive research on children’s storytelling and story retelling skills as well as intervention work examining the effectiveness of explicit teaching of story structure on narrative outcomes. This section further extends the literature by including a discussion of the skills and conditions that are expected to support highly proficient and expert narrative performance. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how theoretically-derived refinements in teaching procedures could facilitate narrative skill acquisition and lead to sufficient advances in preschool children to support higher levels of school-age language, literacy, math, and science achievements.
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