Clinical Focus: Clinical Applications of the Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) Protocol for Assessment of Personal Event Narrative Language

PURPOSE: Personal event narratives are a universal form of discourse across cultures and languages. Developing the ability to share personal event narratives supports friendships, classroom participation, academic success, and vocational outcomes. Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) is a free-access protocol with scripted prompts based on emotions and experienced events, designed to elicit personal event narratives from children and adolescents. This clinical focus article provides guidelines for the use of Global TALES in multilingual contexts, including careful translation/adaptation of the protocol, principles and methods of dynamic assessment, and procedures for analysis of personal narrative samples. METHOD: The authors reviewed literature focused on the contribution of personal event narrative language to a comprehensive language assessment and intervention plan. Results explain optimal linguistic and cultural adaptation procedures applicable to the Global TALES protocol, considerations when collaborating with interpreters, administration of dynamic assessment methods compatible with eliciting and evaluating narrative language, and language sample analysis procedures appropriate for results obtained using Global TALES. The authors outline their clinical experience using Global TALES in English, Spanish, and Tz'utujil, a Mayan language. CONCLUSIONS: Global TALES is a cross-linguistically and cross-culturally useful protocol for obtaining personal event narratives from children and adolescents, including in contexts where no other validated language assessment tools are available. The Global TALES protocol prompts focus on common experiences across various cultures and languages, and they are appropriate for the clinical assessment of personal event narrative language in both monolingual and multilingual children. Potential clinical applications of the Global TALES protocol include careful linguistic and cultural adaptation of the protocol, conducting interactionist and interventionist dynamic assessment procedures to assess expansion and "modifiability" of children's narrative language, and analyzing personal narrative microstructure and macrostructure elements in the elicited language samples. Results obtained using Global TALES can contribute to a comprehensive language assessment using converging evidence to determine eligibility for speech and language services for monolingual and multilingual learners. Information collected using Global TALES can also contribute to the development of appropriate intervention plans for children with developmental language disorders.