This paper describes a procedure used to locate pretend play episodes in streams of play activity of 4- and 5-year-olds. A story grammar was used to compare pretend play episode activity with story construction. Participants were five girls and three boys attending the same preschool. Pretend play schemes and episodes were defined in terms of…

Folk models have been called unspecified programs that are passed on and learned experientially. Through a narrative reconstruction of a participant observer's fieldnotes on an eighth-grade teacher's professional activity, the researcher sensed two folk models at work: (1) knowledge as corpus, hierarchically organized; and (2) knowledge in…

The writing patterns of adult native speakers of English was compared to that of students of English as a second language (ESL). Both groups wrote brief narrative accounts of a story they had seen on film. The writings revealed three basic organizational patterns, one pattern covering the six critical elements that made up the short story and two…

The psychological report is a particular genre of writing, incorporating elements of content and style shared by other literary genres, and appearing in many different forms. These forms range from terse, profile driven description of strengths and weaknesses, characteristic of computer generated psychological reports, to more descriptive,…

This study was conducted to investigate how literature and literacy could merge, what effect immersion in a particular type of literature had on the writing and oral stories the children were producing, and what effect spontaneous talk and storymaking had on the classroom literacy process. Each day for 8 weeks, 10 fifth-grade students met…

To determine the relationship between oral and written language conventions at the macro and micro levels, a study analyzed various elements of stories generated by children. Subjects, nine above average readers between grades 4 and 9, were asked to tell a story and then to write a story. Sources of stories, overall plot organization, and number…

A study compared the narrative structures in stories told by monolingual Swedish-speaking children (n=19) and Finnish-speaking immersion students of Swedish (n=19), all in fifth grade. The immersion students had been taught in immersion since kindergarten. Subjects each told a story based on a wordless picture book, which was then analyzed for a…

An example of reader, writer, and text transaction and interaction may be seen in a study that examined story grammar and applied propositional analysis, cohesive analysis, and miscue analysis to one reader and one text to determine comprehension. A third grade boy read and then retold the story "The Accident." The miscues were marked,…

The textbuilding conventions of courtship narratives told by older women of contrasting ethnic minorities are examined. Listener responses to the stories indicate that storytelling conventions are not shared or understood by all listeners. It is proposed that membership in different speech communities based on factors such as age, sex, ethnicity,…

Thirty hearing-impaired children at a residential school for the deaf, a day school for the deaf, and a day program for the deaf in a regular public elementary school were shown picture books, asked to tell the story, and asked to respond to specific questions. Results showed that the ability to process questions was related to the structure of…

In modern societies, children are becoming more and more users of a child culture constructed by adults, rather than producers of their own culture. This paper describes a project, implemented in Nordic child care centers and early childhood classes, that provides children the opportunity to narrate and illustrate their own stories, written down…

A study determined whether instruction on story elements within rich contexts can increase students' understanding of the characters' traits and motives, their comprehension of stories, and their ability to write causally coherent stories. Instruction was organized around an "anchor" (a story rich with embedded information presented on…

To encourage children's creative writing in a classroom setting, student teachers used two types of children's books as models: (1) a traditionally structured picture book in which the story maintains strong development of plot, setting, and characters as in "Peter Rabbit"; and (2) a predictable pattern book that develops a repetitive pattern as…

Based on the hypothesis that teachers' naturally occurring presentations of storyreading have an effect on children's literacy learning, a study examined whether teachers can be trained to provide a structure for listening to stories and whether this type of presentation would result in significant gains in children's story understanding. Five…

A study examined the effects of an integrated reading/writing curriculum on the narrative writing of students in general education eighth-grade classrooms. Subjects, 93 students (including 10 with learning disabilities) from middle to upper-middle socioeconomic backgrounds at a suburban middle school in western Oregon, were administered narrative…