Discusses extending the "Witch's Hat" technique with the Problem-Solution pattern and the dialog projection technique to help learners comprehend and produce basic narrative discourse in English by developing awareness of the rhetorical structure of stories. Discusses benefits of the combined strategy. (RS)

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit…

This study investigated written language production in 10-year-old children with impaired reading comprehension. Despite fluent and accurate reading, these children are poor at understanding what they read. Participants completed a spelling test, and were asked to write an extended narrative, prompted by a series of pictures. Poor comprehenders…

This qualitative study uses an analysis of literature circle discussions to illuminate larger issues of gender and social class for a group of fifth-grade students. By examining how four students were positioned and positioned themselves within these literature conversations, I demonstrate that the roles reproduced certain gender- and…

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…

A study measured the effects that direct instruction in narrative text structure using a story map (called "macrostruction") had on the comprehension of average and above average sixth-grade readers. A 2 x 2 x 2 repeated measures design was used with time, text, and treatment as the independent variables. The number of story grammar idea…

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…

The incorporation of literature into the school curriculum is perceived as an important way to involve students in "real world" reading. To maximize the use of literature in the school curriculum, teachers need to concentrate on three areas: (1) modeling for students; (2) developing a sense of story; and (3) enhancing comprehension…

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…

A study examined how global coherence in story comprehension develops in children through causal inference. Stories of contrasting structure were analyzed by a causal network model. Evidence of parallels between the construction of coherent representations and the development of the story understanding is presented. Data show that children…

This study investigated the possibility that direct instruction in story constituents and their interrelations could enhance children's organization in story writing. It also investigated whether the special instruction might affect quality, coherence, use of temporal and casual relations, and creativity in writing. (Author/JAZ)

Story structure instruction, focusing on forming a mental picture of a story's structure and understanding of story parts, improved poor-reading fourth-graders' (N=20) story writing skills in terms of organization and overall quality but not coherence and creativity, indicating that instruction in story parts can improve some children's writing.…

This book is based on the premise that a writer is much like an artist who paints images, only using grammatical structures as tools. In conjunction with this approach, each chapter is divided into concepts and strategies: concepts illustrate how professional writers have applied image grammar to develop their art, and strategies provide…

In this three-part lesson, students examine structure and characterization in the short story and consider the significance of humor through a study of Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." In Part I, through skits and storytelling, students first examine the structure of Twain's story and the role he creates…