Skill in reading comprehension requires reading sentences to understand an intention embedded between the lines. In the case of narrative, it is particularly necessary to read a narrative and find essential concepts such as emotions of the characters embedded between the lines for comprehending an intention of the narrative. In this work, we focus…

This paper reflects on a 2013-2014 Australia-China Council project in which school students in Australia and China produced and shared digital stories about their everyday lives and local cultures, with students being invited to give feedback on the language and content of the stories produced by their overseas peers. The main lessons learned…

In this paper, individuals with no background in cognitive psychology are provided an introduction to the cognitivists' concepts of prototypes, schemata, and superordinate relations. A prototype is a most-typical instance, a composite, or an average of items in a particular set and serves as a mental representation of the set. A schema, script, or…

Metacognitive strategy instruction was used to teach two deaf children (ages 11 and 12) with differing American Sign Language and English language skills to summarize stories in writing. The instructional program used a knowledge of text structure--specifically story structure--to improve literacy skills by enhancing the children's ability to…

This paper reports on a project started November 1999, which aims at understanding the storytelling structuring processes put into action by children at primary education level. The ultimate goal of this study is to draft a script for a computer tool to support story telling. For this purpose it identifies narrative scheme as the main organizing…

The following study explored the structures and themes found in a few episodes of a popular TV sitcom ("Friends"). Drawing on James Gee's ideas about critical discourse analysis as the main analytical lens for this study, this study discussed the language found in a sitcom and analyzed the complexity of structures and vocabulary in the…

This paper is an exploration of the philosophical and semiotic implications of educational acts of meaning-making that are mediated through narrative inquiry. The paper discusses the risks of a narrative view of teacher education as it is related to the "I"--philosophy tradition of Subjective Idealism. Indeed, modelling the Self may be…

The study evaluated narrative production in seven severe to profoundly hearing impaired adolescents in an attempt to determine whether syntactic prowess would predict which subjects would be more adept at narrative production, in terms of the story grammar conventions used, and the cohesive devices used when narrating a story to a naive listener.…

A three-stage lesson sequence that used story grammars to teach plot development has been proved successful with a group of eight above average third grade students reading Deborah and James Howe's "Bunnicula." The first stage was a training unit designed to familiarize children with a typical story grammar's parts: a theme and plot…

This paper discusses the benefits of storytelling, especially for the classroom teacher. The paper provides 12 activities for students (Kindergarten-12) to demonstrate how storytelling can help develop communication competencies. The activities included in the paper are: folktale cinquain, The Wicked Stepmother Gets Her Day in Court, storytelling…

Based on the notion that visual decisions play an important role in what children recognize and interpret in books and that teachers have a special responsibility to help students become visually literate, this article draws parallels between visual and verbal concepts and suggests some activities for teaching "picture reading" skills in the…

The paper, originally given at a 1986 Ethnic and Multicultural Symposium, reviews the language demands of schools and difficulties with conventional language proficiency measures in predicting the academic achievement of language minority children. It is suggested that language assessment include the assessment of syntactic competencies as well as…

A study investigated both quantitative and qualitative differences between learning disabled (LD) and nonlearning disabled (NLD) subjects across three grade levels on two tasks requiring active processing of story grammar. Twelve LD and 12 NLD subjects were randomly selected from grades 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11 in a southwestern Florida school…

The study compared linguistic analyses of 27 language disabled and 30 normal language children in grades 1-6. The first procedure, cohesive tie analysis, examined surface characteristics of a text for connections between lingustic components that contribute to coherence; the second procedure, story grammar, examined underlying story organization…

A study examined the scripts or schemata--cognitive structures that represent story prototypes--used by African-American children and how they differ from story telling patterns of White middle-class children using a Western, linear "problem solving" story schemata. Samples of oral narratives were collected from 50 African-American…