The aim of this research was to explore the progression of narrative macro-structure in Chinese children between the ages of 3 and 6 in preschool. To investigate the narratives of young children in a Chinese prefecture-level city kindergarten, the study selected the wordless picture book "Frog, Where Are You?" as their material. They…

In this study particular practices in story retelling ware examined, these improved children's comprehension of story structure and enabled them to made comments within and beyond the story. One hundred fifteen (115) kindergarten children composed the treatment and alternative condition. For 8 weeks and for one time per week, 8 well-structured as…

The authors compared the discourse of 100 Israeli preschool teachers with a group of children during three book-sharing contexts: reading, reconstruction, and telling. During telling and reconstruction, the teachers used more utterances and questions and referred more to concept of book and to the illustrations. During reading, they referred more…

This study examined students' ability to improve their reading comprehension through WebQuests that included instruction on story maps and online story reading. Seven students with learning disabilities at the middle school level participated in the study. During each session, on their own computer students independently read a story, reviewed…

This article exposes the problem of using declarative rather than procedural knowledge to help K--12 students recognize irony in stories. It offers commonplace procedures drawn from students' everyday language experience together with more abstract irony clues to help students recognize irony in stories and increase their story comprehension.…

This study investigated the effects of a modified system of least prompts and an electronic story-mapping intervention for elementary students with autism spectrum disorder. Participants were first taught to identify story element definitions using constant time delay. Participants then listened to age-appropriate narrative texts with a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of digital and non-digital storybooks on low-income preschoolers' oral language comprehension. Employing a within-subject design on 38 four-year-olds from a Head Start program, we compared the effect of medium on preschoolers' target words and comprehension of stories. Four digital…

Understanding a story is an active process, whether children have listened to it being read aloud or, when they are older and read it for themselves. When children grasp a story, they (1) attend to what is important; (2) anticipate what is to come; and (3) build meaningful patterns from the many details. These active interactions with a story can…

Although early reading instruction focuses on phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, research indicates that reading comprehension strategies can be effectively taught to young students. Peer-reviewed studies that employed experimental or quasi-experimental designs and included children between the ages of five and nine, some of whom had…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of structured story reading intervention, "S"tory re"T"elling and higher order thinking for "E"nglish "L"anguage and "L"iteracy "A"cquisition (STELLA), delivered to 38 Hispanic English language learners (ELL) placed in an enhanced transitional bilingual programme over 2 years from…

Librarians, teachers, authors, video game designers, corporate executives, in fact all providers of information struggle with the dilemma of how to get consumers of information engaged with their message. School librarians know that engaged students learn more and retain the information longer; authors and game designers want their readers and…

The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to…

Seventy-two first-, third-, and fifth-grade Black children heard stories about Black and White students engaged in computer, physical education, social studies, and spelling tasks at school. Children were asked to evaluate the ability, effort, experience of task difficulty, and likelihood of task success for the story characters. Findings…

It is essential to help foster students' social awareness in addition to their academic skills. Through discussions of stories that emphasize social issues such as racism and prejudice, students have the opportunity to develop and explore their own beliefs. But what do they really learn, and how? In this article, the authors document their efforts…