This study aims to investigate narrative competence of bilingual children from low socio-economic status (SES) before and after they were involved in fourteen weeks of Turkish storytelling activities. Fifteen bilingual children from low-SES backgrounds participated in this research. Bilingual children first produced narratives using Mercer Mayer's…

This article introduces an approach that middle-school teachers can follow to help their students carry out linguistic-based literary analyses. As an example, it draws on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to show how J.K. Rowling used language to characterize Hermione as an intelligent female in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."…

The following exploratory study examines the effects of a "Harry Potter"-inspired "border crossing" analogy (HPBCA) on preservice teachers' (n = 25) Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) content knowledge and disposition toward English language learners (ELLs). The analogy capitalizes on the prior and shared…

Schema is one of the most common terms used for classifying and constructing knowledge. Therefore, a schema is a pre-planned set of concepts. It usually contains social information and is used to represent chain of events, perceptions, situations, relationships and even objects. For example, Kant initially defines the idea of schema as some…

Gholam Hussein Sa'edi is one of the greatest Iranian writers of short stories in the present era. Sa'edi's stories are based on the existence of fanciful and dreamlike settings in which he attempts to establish the endings of the stories to be the direct result of the characters' psychological reaction against their dreams. The linguistic and…

Several studies have revealed the cognitive and linguistic benefits of balanced bilingualism, but the research on balanced biliteracy is still in its initial stages (Marinis et al. submitted. "Biliteracy Education Impacts on Cognition Selectively"). This study investigates the positive effects of balanced biliteracy on the development of…

Purpose: This study was conducted to determine whether a narrative intervention program that targeted the use of mental state and causal language resulted in positive gains in narrative production for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: Five children (2 girls and 3 boys) who had been diagnosed with ASD participated in the study.…

Purpose: Prior theoretical and empirical work has referenced several broad stages of narrative development, particularly in terms of young children's understanding of story structure. However, there is considerable variation in how story structure has been defined and assessed across these studies. The aims of the present study were threefold: (a)…

Purpose: Prior theoretical and empirical work has referenced several broad stages of narrative development, particularly in terms of young children's understanding of story structure. However, there is considerable variation in how story structure has been defined and assessed across these studies. The aims of the present study were threefold: (a)…

This early-stage feasibility study investigated the effects of a multitiered oral narrative language intervention on oral language, reading comprehension, and writing. Twenty-eight second-grade students participated in this quasi-experimental control group study with assignment at the classroom level. The independent variable was large- and…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

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…

"Bookaboo" is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in "That Rabbit Belongs to…

Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series (2005-2008) and Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" series (2008-2010) have been hugely successful and influential texts, both as best-selling literary works and as action movie franchises. (To avoid confusion, "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games" in this essay refer to the…

Dialogue might be the most appropriate medium for reflections on translingualism. In a dialogue conducted by email over the course of ten days, Steven G. Kellman and Ilan Stavans consider the validity and implications of linguistic determinism. Their conversation examines whether some words that seem to embody the unique "Weltanschaaung"…