Abstract
Oral narratives are a commonly used, meaningful means of communication that reflects academic language. New state curriculum standards include narrative-related language expectations for young school-age children, including story grammar and complex language. This article provides a review of preschool narrative-based language intervention studies, with special attention to how the intervention accelerated young children's story grammar and complex language beyond developmental expectations, meeting or even exceeding recently adopted state language standards. In addition, we provide an overview of a narrative-based language intervention used with culturally and linguistically diverse preschoolers to prepare them for meeting the language standards in elementary school. Evidence supports a conclusion that personal-themed stories that are developmentally and socially appropriate for preschoolers can strengthen children's use of mainstream story grammar and complex language, which will be an asset to them in elementary school.