Introduction to the Forum: Global Assessment of Narratives

Abstract

Purpose: This article introduces the Forum: Global Assessment of Narratives, which brings together contributions highlighting two freely accessible narrative assessment tools developed for international and cross-linguistic use: Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) for eliciting personal narratives, and LITMUS-MAIN (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings–Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives) for eliciting fictional narratives. It summarizes how narrative-based approaches can enrich and enhance existing assessment practices and argues that narratives are an integral part of clinical assessment, as they allow for in-depth, multidimensional evaluation of an individual's spoken language skills. Method: We first provide a rationale for considering both personal narrative and fictional narrative assessment in clinical practice. Then, we outline the development of Global TALES and MAIN, including progress made in recent years. We end with a summary of the six articles in this forum, highlighting their clinical implications. Conclusion: In a world of increasing global mobility, speech-language clinicians need reliable, ecologically valid, and culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools. This forum is designed to benefit clinicians and researchers by presenting a novel perspective on narratives, framed through two narrative genres. The approaches described are theoretically grounded, ecologically valid (not perceived as a test), precise, and well accepted by children worldwide. By bringing these tools to the clinical community, we hope to promote more effective and precise evaluation of children's narrative skills in our contemporary time shaped by technological, social, and demographic transformation.