Everybody has a story.

This past spring, I had the opportunity to present Rooted Narratives: Resistance Through Culturally Responsive Dynamic Assessment at the National Black Speech Language Hearing Association’s annual convention. The session was built around the intersection of autobiographical memory research, identity development, and narrative assessment for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learners.

This blog is the debrief. 

How We Assess Narrative

Most of our assessment tools were not built with CLD children in mind. And narrative assessment may inadvertently be built around a very specific kind of story: Western, linear, individually centered, emotionally expressive, with a clear beginning, problem, and resolution.

That story structure is cultural, not universal.

When a child from a Latine, Indigenous, African, Black, or Asian background tells a story differently, one that may be more communal, descriptive, or episodic, that is not a breakdown in story grammar. That is a different cultural narrative tradition doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

What Autobiographical Memory Has to Do With It

Narrative development does not happen in a vacuum. It is rooted in autobiographical memory — the way children learn to organize, interpret, and communicate their personal experiences over time.

And autobiographical memory is a cognitive and a social process.

The way caregivers reminisce with children shapes the structure, emotional content, and cultural framing of how children eventually tell their own stories. Parents who use a highly elaborative style, like asking open-ended questions, expanding on details, and adding emotional and evaluative language, raise children who tell richer, more coherent narratives (Fivush, 2008; Fivush et al., 2011).

Those elaborative styles are themselves cultural products. Western cultures, particularly White middle-class families, tend to be rewarded for that exact style. Other cultures may prioritize communal themes, moral context, or brevity, and their children arrive at school telling stories that reflect exactly that.

Difference Versus Disorder: The Clinical Line We Cannot Afford to Get Wrong

For children with developmental language disorder (DLD), the narrative deficits tend to show up in microstructure: grammar, sentence length, lexical diversity, and verbal productivity (Winters et al., 2022).

For multilingual learners without a disorder, the macrostructure — the story's overall organization — is often preserved. That is because story structure draws on cognitive-narrative processes that transcend any single language. Where multilingual learners may differ is in surface-level language features, which look different from disorder when you know what to look for (Andreou & Lemoni, 2020).

So when a CLD child's narrative looks “weak”:

• Is it a language disorder?

• Is it limited exposure to Western narrative conventions?

• Is it a reflection of a different but valid cultural story structure?

Dynamic assessment can help answer these questions.

What Culturally Responsive Dynamic Assessment Actually Looks Like

If you are new to dynamic assessment, start here. It is an earlier post covers the basics.

The test–teach–retest model gives us a way to do this:

1. Test — Elicit a baseline narrative without scaffolding. What can the child do independently?

2. Teach — Provide targeted scaffolding. Offer vocabulary support, visual prompts, and story structure cues. How does the child respond?

3. Retest — Elicit again. Did the scaffolding make a difference? How much, and how quickly?

A child who responds well to scaffolding is showing you learning potential. That is a very different clinical picture from a child with true disorder.

The cultural piece means we also need to:

• Ask families about their narrative traditions 

• Choose elicitation topics that are meaningful to the child (a trip to the store might matter more than a wordless picture book about a kid in the suburbs)

• Avoid penalizing evaluative or descriptive language that does not "fit" the story grammar rubric but reflects genuine narrative sophistication

• Interpret results in light of language exposure and home language use

ASHA's Practice Portal on Cultural Responsiveness is a solid starting point if you want to dig deeper into the evidence base for culturally responsive practice.

Why This Is Also an Identity Issue

Autobiographical memory is the mechanism behind the self.

When children can tell coherent personal narratives, connecting past experiences to present understanding, explaining why something mattered, placing themselves in a story that extends beyond a single moment, they are building identity.

And when SLPs scaffold that ability, especially for CLD children who may be navigating multiple cultural identities, multiple languages, and the message that their "different" narratives are problems to be fixed, we are honoring the full complexity of who they are.

Research supports the connection between coherent autobiographical narrative and lower anxiety, better coping, and overall emotional well-being (Fivush et al., 2011). 

The Bottom Line

If you are assessing narrative in CLD children right now, here are the questions worth sitting with:

• Are your tools designed for the population you serve?

• Do you know enough about each child's cultural and linguistic background to interpret what you are seeing?

• Are you distinguishing between what a child cannot do and what a child has not yet been exposed to?

This also connects to how we write goals. If you are not sure how to translate these ideas into measurable, culturally grounded IEP goals, check out Culturally Responsive Goal Writing.

Next Steps

• The Rooted Narratives presentation recording link is coming soon.

• Read Dynamic Assessment Basics if this framework is new to you.

• Join the free CLD Open Access community space for ongoing discussion, free events, and resources built specifically for clinicians working with CLD learners.

References

Andreou, G., & Lemoni, G. (2020). Narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual pre-school and primary school children with developmental language disorder (DLD): A systematic review. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 10(5), 429–458. https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ojml_2020091814494607.pdf

Fivush, R. (2008). Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family narratives. Memory Studies, 1(1), 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083888

Fivush, R., Habermas, T., Waters, T. E. A., & Zaman, W. (2011). The making of autobiographical memory: Intersections of culture, narratives and identity. International Journal of Psychology, 46(5), 321–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207594.2011.596541

Fivush, R., & Nelson, K. (2004). Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory. Psychological Science, 15(9), 573–577. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00722.x

Westby, C. E., & Culatta, B. (2016). Telling tales: Personal event narratives and life stories. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 47(4), 260–282. https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_LSHSS-15-0073

Winters, K. L., Jasso, J., Pustejovsky, J. E., & Byrd, C. T. (2022). Investigating narrative performance in children with developmental language disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 65(10), 3908–3929. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00017