Social stories

Social Stories is an intervention programme, originally used with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but has started to be used more widely to improve pragmatic language skills (use of language) as part of speech and language therapy.

This intervention can be delivered by a wide range of practitioners following training.

The story is a relatively short, straightforward description of social situations and context.
To write a Social Story, Sansosti, Powell-Smith and Kincaid (2004) summarised four steps:

1) target a specific problematic social situation;
2) identify the key features of the context or setting;
3) share the features with the child and teacher/therapist; and
4) use these features to generate a Social Story