One of the greatest myths or fictions of nonfiction is that it contains no fiction. Ben Franklin's flight from Boston to Philadelphia illustrates how changes occur in the retelling of the "facts" of a life. In his "Autobiography," Franklin writes that his friend, Collins, arranged for a ship's passage for Franklin by telling…

This study was conducted to examine tutoring as a pedagogical tool to enhance learning in the tutor. Three groups of high school students were subjects of the study. The first group, instructed in a story grammar and its use as a recall apparatus, taught the strategy to younger students; the second, an equivalent group, was given strategy…

Sixteen subjects with autism and 16 with Down Syndrome (aged 5 to 27), matched on verbal mental age, watched a short puppet show or video skit and were then asked to tell the story to a listener and answer follow-up questions. The majority of both groups were able to produce recognizable, though primitive, narratives. The groups did not differ in…

Focusing on conversational stories of personal experience (SPEs), this paper explores the narrative skills of preschool-aged black children in a low-income, urban community. Although linguistic and anthropological work attest to a flourishing tradition of story telling among black adults, little is known about the ways in which children become…

To help students achieve a better understanding of narrative prose, yet still keep the benefits of semantic mapping, the traditional form of the semantic map is modified by incorporating the elements of story structure as part of the map. This format is called episodic mapping. Episodic mapping is based on the idea that most well-developed stories…

Children's visual attention to, and comprehension of, a television program was measured. A total of 64 children, equally distributed by sex, with 32 in kindergarten and 32 in fifth grade, were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions that crossed two levels of content cues with two levels of sound effects. The content cue conditions…

Factors that may influence the picture-elicited narrative production of 4-year-old children were examined. Subjects were 70 children of 4 years of age who told narratives about two familiar events: baking cookies and going to the beach. Of the sample, 22 children in a description condition described each of 6 line drawings for each event. Another…

To understand what kinds of mental processing take place during reading and how the child encodes information that is presented, a study investigated the comprehension of a story by asking the reader to take part actively in the decision-making of the protagonist. Subjects, 56 children from a fourth- and sixth-grade class at an elementary school…

The concept of Arithmetic Story Grammar is introduced. Arithmetic Story Grammar maintains that any equation containing a single operand tells, in and of itself, a complete story with a setting, plot, theme, and resolution. Multiple-operand equations differ from their single-operand siblings only in the number of actions undertaken and the number…

A study examined the process of change in story development (in contrast to documenting common structures) found in the stories generated by cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students. Subjects, 12 first-grade native English-speaking students in either of two separate school districts and 23 cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students representing the…

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

A three-part exploratory study was conducted to examine children's responses to interactive, nonlinear HyperCard stories and the children's design of stories in HyperCard. Twenty-three fifth graders took part in a semester-long language arts training program that included HyperCard as well as traditional stories in books. Two questions were posed:…

The preservice teachers who participated in this study were first semester seniors in a Social Studies Methods class. The study took place in the second year of a university/public school partnership program between the elementary education faculty at Indiana University South Bend and teachers at six schools within the South Bend Community School…

Over the past several years, teachers at the West Virginia University Child Development Laboratory have used the language experience approach to develop the literacy skills of young children. To increase child involvement, a scrapbook project for 4-year-olds was conducted each Wednesday for 1 academic year. Each child received a scrapbook and…

Focusing on variables linking fourth graders' reading comprehension and writing ability, a study investigated the (1) relationship between both free recall and comprehension probe scores in reading and analytical scale scores in writing, (2) effects of reading and writing competence on the production of story grammar categories in writing, (3)…