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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Respectively, three experiments indicate that (1) people can identify all the terminal units in stories as well as different kinds of episodic structure; (2) when attention was focused on the intermediate units, the Goal Path emerged in the judgments; and (3) the same judgments about terminal units were made even when the number of sentences per…

An instructional strategy for teaching comprehension of literature was tested with seven high school students with learning disabilities. The strategy taught story grammar through use of short stories and the paradigm of modeling/guided practice/independent practice. Students showed improved story comprehension. (Author/JDD)

This study, involving 16 intermediate-grade children with mild mental retardation, 29 children with learning disabilities, and 37 children without disabilities, found that all groups recalled cohesive story versions better than noncohesive versions. Statements in the stories' causal chain were better recalled than statements not in the causal…

A study examined whether text structures were included in the "oral" videotaped retellings of a second grader with deafness across 28 texts. Improvements in the child's ability to include specific elements of text structures were documented over nine months. A 12-month increase in reading ability and narrative ability was also documented.…

Through story grammar instruction, low-achieving students are discovering that literature can be fun to read and perhaps have application to their own lives. (Author/TE)

Investigates the effectiveness of instruction in story mapping as a means to promote first-grade students' comprehension of central story elements in children's literature. Concludes that instruction in story mapping is an effective instructional strategy for promoting first-grade students' ability to identify central narrative elements in…

Discusses how beginning readers respond to familiar and unfamiliar stories. States that children begin as inventive readers, using different strategies--such as naming, counting, or structuring--to "read" the text. (MM)