E065 · Communication & interaction
Difficulty organising and retelling events or ideas
What might be happening when a young person knows what happened, or has ideas they want to share, but struggles to organise them into a sequence that another person can easily follow?
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Overview
Communicating an event, explaining an idea or telling a story requires more than knowing the relevant information.
The young person may need to:
- decide what information matters
- establish who or what they are talking about
- organise events into a meaningful order
- connect causes and consequences
- provide enough context for the listener
- maintain the main point
- use language to link ideas together
- monitor whether the listener understands.
These abilities are often described within narrative language or discourse.
A young person can therefore remember an experience in considerable detail but find answering “What happened?” surprisingly difficult.
This matters well beyond storytelling. Narrative organisation supports classroom explanation, reading comprehension, writing, friendship conversations, recounting difficult experiences and telling adults when something has gone wrong.
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What this might look like
A young person might:
- begin an explanation in the middle
- give events in an order that is difficult to follow
- leave out information the listener needs
- assume the listener already knows important context
- include many details without making the main point clear
- struggle to explain how one event led to another
- jump between people, times or topics
- find “Tell me what happened” much harder than answering specific questions
- produce very short accounts despite remembering more when prompted
- lose track of the original question while explaining
- struggle to retell a story they have read or watched
- give much stronger accounts with pictures or prompts
- find written narratives or extended explanations similarly difficult
- become frustrated when adults misunderstand their account.
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Developmental expression
At this stage
Early childhood
Young children gradually learn to organise experiences and stories through shared conversation and play. Adults often provide substantial prompting and help establish sequence and meaning.
Early childhood
Young children gradually learn to organise experiences and stories through shared conversation and play. Adults often provide substantial prompting and help establish sequence and meaning.
Middle childhood
Curriculum demands increasingly require retelling, explanation, inference and extended written or spoken responses. Narrative differences may become much more visible.
Early adolescence
Academic explanations become more complex while friendship and social situations require young people to communicate increasingly nuanced accounts of events, motives and misunderstandings.
Later adolescence
Young people are expected to explain experiences independently to teachers, employers, health professionals and other services. Difficulty constructing a clear narrative can therefore affect advocacy as well as academic work.
Choose each stage to see how the presentation and surrounding expectations may change over time.
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Strengths and differences
A young person who struggles to organise a narrative may nevertheless have:
- excellent memory for individual details
- strong factual knowledge
- vivid imagery
- creativity
- sophisticated ideas
- perceptive observations
- strong understanding when somebody else provides the structure.
The difficulty may lie in organising information for another person's consumption, not in understanding the experience itself.
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Top tips for support
- Replace broad “Tell me what happened” questions with gentle structure.
- Use prompts such as who / where / what happened first / what happened next / how did it end?
- Allow drawing, photographs, timelines or objects to support the account.
- Give thinking time.
- Help identify the main point before adding detail.
- Model ways of connecting events without taking over the young person's story.
- Avoid interpreting a disorganised account as dishonesty.
- Check meaning rather than demanding perfectly chronological speech.
- Provide planning structures before extended writing.
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Things needing careful planning
Narrative performance depends on many factors, including language, memory, attention, familiarity, culture and the support provided by the listener.
Research shows that children's narrative output changes according to how stories are elicited and supported; the format of the task itself can affect the length and complexity of what a young person produces. (1)
This is particularly important when adults are trying to understand a significant incident.
Difficulty producing a coherent account should never by itself be treated as evidence that the event did not happen.
Narrative conventions also vary culturally. Phoenix should not treat one culturally specific storytelling style as the universal standard for an organised or meaningful account.
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Practical support principles
Useful supports can include:
- visual story maps
- timelines
- sequencing cards
- explicit teaching of narrative structure
- sentence starters
- modelling
- rehearsal
- repeated opportunities to tell and retell
- written or pictorial preparation before speaking
- specific rather than overly broad questions
- specialist speech-and-language support where difficulties are significant.
From understanding to support
Phoenix Atlas connections
Often useful
- visual communication supports
- explicit language teaching
- narrative/story-grammar approaches
- communication-access approaches
- planning and organisational scaffolding
Worth considering
- targeted speech-and-language intervention
- supported written composition
- metacognitive approaches.
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Evidence and cautions
Narrative intervention has a substantial school-age evidence base. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 40 studies found overall positive effects on narrative comprehension and production, with common features including opportunities to produce narratives, verbal and visual supports and explicit teaching of story structure. (2)
Narrative intervention can also support wider language targets such as vocabulary, inferencing and complex language, reinforcing why this presentation deserves a distinct route within the Phoenix Encyclopaedia rather than being reduced to “poor storytelling.” (2)
Transfer beyond the taught context is not guaranteed, however; reviews of academic discourse intervention show more variable evidence for generalisation. (3)
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Public evidence sources
- How narrative elicitation affects children's narrative performance — systematic review.
- Narrative interventions for school-age children: systematic review and meta-analysis — systematic review and meta-analysis.
- Academic discourse intervention and generalisation — systematic review.
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Possible explanatory lenses
Relevant possibilities include:
- expressive language
- receptive language
- narrative/discourse organisation
- working memory
- executive functioning
- sequencing
- attention
- word retrieval
- social communication
- anxiety or pressure
- cultural and linguistic experience.
About this entry’s source
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Source status describes the underlying material. The current site edition is Open Beta; the evidence notes and limitations remain part of the entry.