Benefits of the Wordless Picture Books & Guide

Developing narrative skills

Developing narrative skills are essential to communicating, socialising, literacy and academic progress. In fact it is well documented that narrative skills are a good predictor for literacy skills and academic progress (Bishop & Edmundson (1987); Boudreau et al. (1999); Naremore (1995); Feagans (1982)). Being able to coherently order and share key events, so that the listener can understand and follow, can be a challenging task for all children developing these skills, but especially for children with speech, communication and language needs.  Narrative skills emerge from the age of three and start with skills such as sequencing, linking events with conjunctions, and more complex skills are developed later such as: explaining cause and effect, describing characters emotions and intentions, and being able to interpret endings. Learning to tell stories is one way of building these skills and wordless picture books have their own particular advantages for developing them. Although, there are many wordless picture books available on the market, not all suit the needs of children with speech, communication and language needs.  My series of wordless picture books and guide have been developed especially for these children. Three main advantages of my resource are highlighted below.

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Benefit 1: Better Comprehension for the child

Often children with gaps in their receptive and expressive language skills will rely on pictures in books to help them understand stories, but this can be problematic because children’s books rely on the text to carry stories, and the pictures are often there to accompany the text. I’ve created the wordless books to address this problem- the pictures in these books carry the stories- and they follow a film scroll approach- leaving short gaps between each stage of the story. They are also centered on familiar events such as making a sandwich and going to a supermarket. This formula makes the books accessible to children who are developing their language skills and require that extra support for better comprehension.

For the same reasons outlined above, the resource could be useful for EAL learners (children for who English is another language) and for children who are deaf, as both groups may rely on pictures to understand stories.  

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Benefit 2: Adaptable to a child’s language level

Another strength of wordless picture books is the level of language used to tell the story can be adapted by the child and adult to whatever level the child is at. The books are accompanied by a guide for the practitioner which includes scripts for the stories. The stories can be told at three different sentence and narrative levels: simple, intermediate and complex. The sentences levels are based on key narrative skill development areas and start from simple clauses to sentences tying in events and the reactions of characters.  

Wordless books also provide more opportunity for a child and adult to make meaning of the story collaboratively which can lead to exposing the child to more complex language than would have occurred using general books. Researchers Gillam & Boyce (2012) have found that “when creating a story or just responding to pictures, the parent used many words and complex sentence structures while engaging with their child. That level of engagement wasn’t as present when reading books with text,” said Gillam.

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Benefit 3: Multifunctional for teaching and generalising key skills

The wordless books were created with the aim of teaching and generalising key additional skills which facilitate narrative comprehension and storytelling such as: WH questions, inference, time concepts, sequencing, emotions, and cause and effect. A chapter is devoted to each of these skills in the guide book, and for ease of use, each chapter contains a thorough list of questions or skills needed to work on that skill.  Beth Gibby, Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, who has trialed the resource has commented on the usefulness of this ‘This resource makes it easy to work on lots of different skills at the same time, whilst reading one story…’

- Kulvinder Kaur
Speechmark author of Wordless Picture Books and Guide