Global TALES: Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories 

The Global TALES project was initiated by the Child Language Committee of the International Association for Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP) in 2018.

In this project, an international team of researchers (including Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA, Russia, Israel, Cyprus, Greece) set out to investigate methods for eliciting and analyzing children’s personal event narratives, with the ultimate aim of developing global tools and approaches to support interventions for this important skill in children with significant challenges in their learning, including those with language disorders.

During 2018/2019, we developed an elicitation protocol (the Global TALES protocol) and conducted a pilot study, in which we used the protocol to elicit personal narratives from 10-year-old children from a range of countries. The protocol has been registered and interested parties are kindly asked to contact the project leader (A/Prof Marleen Westerveld) for permission to use the protocol for research purposes.

Since 2018, the project team has attracted members from other countries, including Ireland, Sweden, South Africa, Canada, and Belgium.

The full protocol is published on the Open Science Framework: OSF Global TALES home page

I have created a brief 7 minute overview

Story Time: Providing Early Literacy Sessions in Libraries to Preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum and their Parents: Free Online Learning Module

Team: Marleen Westerveld, Jessica Paynter, Kate Simpson, David McCartney, Kate O'Leary, First Five Forever team, Brisbane City Council

In a Queensland first, our interdisciplinary team of Speech Pathologists, Psychologists, Early Childhood Educators, and Librarians developed and trialled a professional development resource for librarians. Our research culminated in an evidence-based online resource package. This set of resources, specifically developed for librarians, aims to increase awareness of autism and how this may impact on a child’s participation in story time. To register for this online professional development module, please visit the E-Learning page on this website.

We have created a brief promotion video highlighting the importance of story time sessions for promoting emergent literacy development:

Please watch a brief video outlining the development and content of the online learning module.

Contact me for further information or to register for this online professional development module, please visit the E-Learning page on this website.

If you would like to create a social story "Going to the Library" - please go to the link below to download the template.

Reading Success in the Primary Years: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Guide Assessment and Intervention

Marleen Westerveld, Rebecca Armstrong, Georgina Barton

This open access book describes the Reading Success project, in which a 5-step, assessment-to- intervention process, based on the Simple View of Reading, was used within a primary school setting in Australia to better support those students who struggle with reading. It provides an easily accessible overview of each step of the process involved in implementing this approach and highlights the crucial importance of collaboration between professionals involved in the teaching of reading within a school setting.  It focuses on the decision-making processes used, such as rich dialogue with the leadership team and teachers, and shares participants’ perspectives gathered throughout the project. Using case studies, the book describes how the 5-step approach assists in creating detailed profiles of students’ strengths and weaknesses in spoken and written language skills that can be used to guide targeted intervention This book offers valuable insights for educators, speech pathologists, researchers, and pre-service teacher education students interested in the teaching of reading.

We have created a brief 5 min overview:

You may view a 1-hour-webinar here:

This book is open access.

Shared Book Reading Intervention for Preschoolers with Autism (2015 - 2017)

Team: Marleen Westerveld, Jessica Paynter, David Trembath, Yolanda Borucki.

This project was funded by the Autism CRC - Please watch our 5 min video explaining what we did, what we found, and what the parents told us:

... or download the Snapshot.

This Study has been published and is available for Free: 

Westerveld, M. F., Wicks, R., & Paynter, J. (2021). Investigating the effectiveness of parent-implemented shared book reading intervention for preschoolers with ASD. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(2), 149-162.

Literacy Predictors for Young Children on the Autism Spectrum

Project Leaders: Marleen Westerveld & Jessica Paynter

This program of research was funded by the Autism CRC (Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism). We initially assessed a group of 57 verbal preschoolers with autism on a range of emergent literacy tasks. These results were published in 2017. and revealed relative strengths in code-related skills (alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness) and challenges with oral-language related skills. The results from this project have been summarised beautifully by Hanen. We found that the group of preschoolers with autism showed particular difficulties in oral narrative skills, despite relatively good performance on standardised language tests  (see our 2017 publication on the oral narrative skills of preschoolers with autism). We then followed 41 of these children up once they had started formal schooling. We found that, despite common perceptions that children with autism are good decoders, that half of our cohort struggled recognising words. These results were published in 2018  and we have created a demonstration video for educators.

Based on our findings we have created a Teacher checklist - Teacher-checklist-V2.docx. Please note that the checklist is not norm-referenced. It is based on the results from our longitudinal research study with verbal preschoolers on the spectrum.