The KANGAROO (Knowledge About Narratives, Grammar, and Retelling Occasions in Order) Program is designed for students in grades 1-4, who present with difficulties understanding and using narratives. It focuses on explicitly teaching the basic elements of story grammar and structure.

Knowledge of narrative structure provides the foundation for a wide range of language and academic skills. Furthermore, explicit teaching of narrative language through modeling and practice leads to better student outcomes and may generalize to written language and real-world situations (Spencer et al., 2020).

Narrative language has been shown to support complex vocabulary and vocabulary development (Hadley & Dickinson, 2018). The KANGAROO program teaches narrative language by focusing on the five main story elements: characters, setting, problem, feelings, and resolution.

KANGAROO also provides students with the opportunity to retell stories using all the story elements to promote cohesive and complete retelling of stories. KANGAROO does this by incorporating frequent story retelling, repetitive patterns, and scaffolding of skills, to not only solidify learning about the elements themselves but also to improve overall narrative storytelling skills (Paris & Paris, 2003).

KANGAROO features stories that are adapted for grade-level vocabulary and syntax structure. Each story contains the relevant elements of story grammar highlighted in the lessons.

Multiple studies have shown that children with language delays and impairments can benefit from explicit teaching of narrative story retelling; most significantly when therapy focuses on macrostructure skills which include the 5 story elements (Justice et al., 2006; MacPherson & Buckler, 2011; Petersen et al., 2014; Petersen & Spencer, 2017).

With this program, students are prompted to repeatedly retell stories, which has been shown to significantly improve narrative macrostructure, as well as aspects of narrative microstructure which include syntax, morphology, and semantics (Petersen, 2011). Evidence has also shown that when story grammar components are missing in narrative intervention, children demonstrate difficulty detecting the causal and temporal relations between them (Spencer, et al., 2020). Teaching narrative structure and narrative language has also been shown to address a wide range of academic skills, such as vocabulary, grammar development, reading, and writing. There is also a strong relation between early oral narrative skills and later reading comprehension (Spencer, et al., 2020).

The KANGAROO Program offers multiple opportunities to interact with story elements by using a collection of stories to promote generalization, as opposed to memorization (Spencer, et al., 2020). It also uses explicit instruction to explain what the story elements are and what role they play within the story. Explicitly teaching children narrative language through modeling and practice also leads to better student narrative language outcomes (Pico, Danielle L., et al., 2021).

To promote students’ narrative language abilities, particularly students with developmental delays or disorders, it is recommended to start with a focus on story grammar, provide multiple opportunities to retell the same story, and model correct grammar and vocabulary (Spencer, et al., 2020). Kangaroo was designed around this evidence. A story is presented as a whole unit to contextualize it, then unpacked into parts for guided practice, and finally reconstructed (Spencer, et al., 2020).