Diagnostics of narrative abilities and Czech adaptation of the MAIN tool

Abstract

Narrative skills are an important area of a child's language development. They divulge the overall level of language skills and are often affected in children with language impairment. They also indicate overall cognitive maturity and may signify the level of some cognitive abilities, such as memory or attention. Narrative skills are also largely related to future school success, especially reading and comprehension of the read text. Therefore it is necessary to deal with this area of language by diagnosis and intervention. The aim of the article is to explain in more detail the essence of narrative abi-lities and to place them in the context of other abilities and skills. We attempt to show how these abilities can be diagnosed and what the progress is in the diagnostics of narrative abilities in the Czech Republic. Finally, we wish to present a new tool for measuring narrative abilities - the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which is current-ly an adaptation of the original English version, currently available in more than 70 languages.

Keywords

• narrative skills
• diagnostics of language skills
• language impairment
• literacy
• multilingual assessment instrument for narratives (main)