Welcome to Lis'n Tell:

Next Lis’n Tell dates:

Lis’n Tell Part 1 intensive for Speech Pathology Team, Athens, Greece – May 2026

Lis’n TellFollow up mentoring (for members Speech Pathology Team trained in 2023), Athens, Greece – May 2026

Blossom House School Intro Day  – Nov 19th 2025

One Day Storytelling/Presentation Skills for Attention Autism Advanced Practitioners  – Nov 11th 2025

Lis’n Tell Core Practitioners Day  – October 10th 2025

Sorry – the next UK Part 1 intensive is postponed owing to my colleague’s family circumstances.

New dates tba soon!

Fantastic feedback received from inset day at The Shelling Camphill Community School in Ringwood August 29th 2025.

I lived as volunteer in this community with the children for six years from my late twenties to early thirties

and it’s very moving to be invited back there to share my work, and run some training…

Two SaLTs came on the 2 day Lis’n Tell Part 1 earlier this year.

May 28 2025 in Guildford Then on to Edinburgh to run a workshop for

co-workers at GARVALD  Social Therapeutic Workshops with Adults with Learning Disabilities.

Followed by May’s Lis’n Tell Part 1 Intensive with Lis’n Tell Core Practitioner SaLT Siobhan Ray 

Siobhan, a highly experienced SaLT, has been using Lis’n Tell for over a decade. She is also a very experienced trainer in Attention Autism.

Then on to Malta to train Speech Pathologists there with Lis’n Tell

Core Practitioner Highly Specialist SaLT Caroline Casula:

Come the autumn – we’ll be showing this in London on 14th September:

I

This autobiographical Storytelling Performance was invited as part of an inset day education & therapeutic staff/carer/support teams at a college and co-housing project for individuals with Intellectual Disabilities: The Mount, Camphill in East Sussex. It was extremely well received.

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The first Advanced Practitioner course will conclude this year and our last workshops will  include:

• Storytelling with Ashley Ramsden, Founding Director of The School of Storytelling, UK
• Teaching out of Your Biography with myself and Child Psychotherapist Retta Bowen

The last Part 1 training was in November 2023 – participants loved the venue! (and the training btw). We had parents of autistic children attend, Speech & Language Therapists, a PhD student and Mentor/Advisor from Ruskin Mill Trust, plus Joint CEO from Frozen Light Theatre.

(do please click on the poster to see it more clearly!)

Lis’n Tell Part 1 Intensive 2023:

A herd of Dala horses,  photo by @Bruce M White

courtesy Bard Graduate Center Gallery

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Last Lis’n Tell: May 25th-26th 2023. I was so pleased to be supported by

SLT Siobhan Ray of https://www.siobhanray.co.uk – a Lis’n Tell trainer in training.

We had a whale of a time!

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Join me in an evening of serious joy and poignant hilarity with stories of my foibles and fables as a Speech and Language Therapist and some tales from around the world – we will also have some exquisite music and singing by incredible musicians of traditional Afghan Music. In the last survey as of October 2022, there were 1500 refugees at the camp near Myteline, with 43% from Afghanistan.

Since before 2000, Lis’n Tell has been at the forefront of the use and development of storytelling in speech and language therapy. Louise’s unique combination of techniques has contributed to the innovations of teams of therapists, teachers, parent groups, Inclusive Theatre Companies and Theatre in Education Practitioners, individual children and their families across the UK and internationally.

Louise and Lis’n Tell have also launched projects at The V and A Museum of Childhood, Buxton, Brighton and Canterbury Arts Festivals, The Museum of London and in numerous schools, where storytelling is increasingly appreciated and loved by children with disabilities, their siblings, parents and teachers. Louise’s collaborative storytelling performance, ‘It was a Dark and Stormy Night’,  has featured in the top 5 Hitlist of Children’s shows at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Passionate about collaboration between art and science, Louise is honoured to have trained teams of NHS Paediatric Speech and Language Therapists (SaLTs), and has taught for ten years on the Greenwich Medway postgraduate SaLT training.

Lis’n Tell during Lockdown20

At Christmas 2019 Louise fell and broke her neck and back. She was still deep in recovery in March 2020 when lockdown began. Her response was to create ‘Fly A Hug’ (FAH), born directly out of her work in Lis’n Tell with the effects of gesture and voice on social communication. This was in response to the needs of a small boy, who was moving into quarantine with his parents, next door to their extended family.The intense inspiration of working with individuals and families from Glasgow to The Isle of Wight proved to be fantastic pain relief!:

Back to Lis’n Tell:

Louise has also been zooming in to coach and mentor parents from Tokyo to Tunbridge Wells, and UK speech and language therapists.

Here is a little about her work and some references.

Some of us cannot imagine telling a story without a book – ‘off the page’….

With Lis’n Tell you can:

• acknowledge and enhance your storytelling skills through rhythm and role, rhyme, repetition and ritual
• develop a range of specialist techniques and core principles to enable and include the spontaneous intentional participation of children with speech language and communication needs.
• develop strategies to weave your specific educational/therapeutic aims into a story
• design bespoke ways to record outcomes, based on tried and tested methods created by Lis’n Tell trained speech and language therapists

For the last few years, Louise has been collaborating with co-workers and tutors in setting up a new speech and language support service at The Mount Camphill Community College for young people with learning disabilities. The service was found to be ‘Outstanding’ by HMS Ofsted Inspectors in July 2014.

Key components of Lis’n Tell, e.g. use of iconic gesture and rhythm, chanting and poetic elements are built on evidence-based theories of word learning,memory, storytelling and literacy development.

For example:

iconic gesture:

• Gesture supports children’s word learning { KARLA K. MCGREGOR University of Iowa, USA, International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2008; 10(3): 112 – 117

Abstract includes:

”… based on a keynote address to the 2007 Speech Pathology Australia National Conference, this review paper summarises three recent research studies that pertain to gesture as an intervention tool. Specifically, the research concerns the utility of gestured input as a scaffold to children’s comprehension of—and hence learning of—spoken words”.

poetry and rhythm in education:

• Rhythmic Perception, Music and Language: A New Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Remediating Specific Language Impairment(Apr 2010- Sept 2014) – The Nuffield Foundation,
  (Research Associate: Dr Ruth Cumming; Research Assistant: Dr Anji Wilson)
• “Poetry aloud: The effect of poetic sound on children’s literacy skills”. Kate Prentice, under Professor Goswami ( Director of The Institute of Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge)A two-year intervention project, examining the hypothesis that regular interaction with the sounds and rhythms of poetry will help to enhance the literacy skills of 5-7 year old children.Part of Kate’s research was featured in the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside the Brain of a 5-year-old with Claudia Hammond, on 29th March 2010.

the effects of storytelling

• Storytelling Aloud
• Storytelling and Literacy Development

Some Other Useful References:

Beginnings of Lis’n Tell – background to Core Technique 1: The Significant Object and “What is it? Whose is it? Where is it from?” (©Coigley 1993)

This verse was first developed by me at Beverley School for the Deaf, Middlesbrough in 1993, for a boy and his object of interest, which was a toy bird. This developed into an exercise/game for his peers, and then others:
Download the PDF here

A pioneer in child led education:

Ashton Warner, S. Teacher Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition (January 31, 1986)

A pioneer in Education through Drama:

Wagner, B. (1976). Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a learning medium. Calendar Islands Publishers; Revised edition edition (1 Jun. 1999)

Recent Research in Children’s Biographical Storytelling:

Westby, C and Culatta, B. (2016) Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, October 2016, Vol. 47, 260-282

and….

Byers, J.  (2010) Treating Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Using Creative Dramatics – Presentation at The American Speech Hearing Association ASHA

Coigley, L. ( 2021) Lis’n Tell: live inclusive storytelling. N. Grove(Ed), Storytelling, Special Needs and Disabilities – 2nd edition. Routledge pp 45-52

Peter, M. (2009). Drama: Narrative pedagogy and socially challenged children. British Journal of Special Education, 36, 9-17.

Peter asserts that “drama as narrative pedagogy can offer even the most remote, hard-to-reach, socially challenged children the opportunity to develop a sense of narrative identity and to move toward more effective participation within a social world” (p. 16).

and – on story reading and storytelling: