Story Frames: supporting silent children in the classroom.
How does a teacher support a child who has recently arrived at school, speaking another language, and who remains completely silent at school for weeks or months, not participating in class and not even playing with other children?
The child’s parents often report that the child speaks and plays normally at home, with their family and with other children who speak the child’s language. These children, undergoing the ‘Silent Period’, are usually children who have relocated from another country, either voluntarily or as refugees or migrants. For a variety of reasons, these children do not have the resilience needed to cope with the many changes and anxieties they have experienced. The losses for these children are more than the loss of familiar faces, places and conversations; the loss of their home language is experienced as a loss of the self they had known before the relocation. The psychoanalytic theories of Colette Granger provide a way to understand the experiences of these migrant children.
The Story Frames book sets out an easy-to-follow, low-cost method of supporting these children, enabling them to emerge from their silence, and to play with other children. The book is written by a speech and language therapist, but any teacher, social worker or volunteer, who is experienced in working with young children, can run this programme.
The methodology of this programme is grounded in the developmental theories of Winnicott and Vygotsky and as such it stresses the nature and quality of the teacher/child relationship which is at the core of this kind of work. The book explores the feelings not only of the child in this situation, but also of the teacher working with such a child; such a teacher must deal with their own anxieties about what the child is experiencing, and about whether they, as the teacher who is expected to solve these problems, could be doing something different.
The Story Frames method is not only for second language learners. It has been successfully used with children who have a wide range of communication disabilities. Children with Developmental Language Disorder, children who stutter, children with intellectual disabilities and Highly Sensitive Children have all benefited from the use of this programme, which uses narrative and pretend play to help the child to develop linguistic and cognitive skills, as well as to have the confidence needed to communicate with others, in spite of the difficulties.
This book is an invaluable source of information for anyone wanting to understand the nature of the teacher or speech therapist’s relationship with children with communication difficulties, and should be essential reading for trainee speech and language therapists, as well as for teachers training in early years education.
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Cynthia Pelman is a speech and language therapist working with children who struggle to communicate due to speech or language delay, learning difficulties or autistic spectrum features. She has worked in this field for over 40 years. Cynthia has also specialised in working with children living in poverty, and uses the cognitive education methods of Reuven Feuerstein to support the learning of these disadvantaged children. Cynthia has more recently specialised in working with children who are able to speak in their home language, but do not speak at school if the language of the school is different from their home language. These children have usually relocated from another country, either by choice or as refugees, with the attendant fears, stresses and anxieties of the loss of familiar faces and spaces, and the loss of their home language. Her most recent book, Story Frames, is a thoughtful presentation of a brief, low-cost programme to support these silent children. Cynthia’s practice as a speech and language therapist is grounded in the work of developmental theorists such as Winnicott and Bowlby, narrative theorists such as Engel and Cattanach, and theories about children’s play such as those of Piaget and Vygotsky. Cynthia believes that it is the relationship between the therapist and the child which is a vital and perhaps under-researched aspect of speech and language therapy. Cynthia has an M.Sc degree in Speech and Language Therapy and an M.A degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. She is a registered member of the U.K. Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT).
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