Classroom teachers have numerous reasons to read to students. Reading to students aids in the understanding of story structure, broadens familiarity with different styles of books, and helps to increase vocabulary. Book language is often different from spoken language, and reading allows students to hear different ways of expressing thoughts.…

This action research study investigated the impacts of teaching strategies based on the balanced literacy approach on story grammar acquisition of three Turkish students with hearing loss. Data were collected from students' work, archival information, interviews and observations during lessons which were audio- and video-recorded. The pre- and…

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…

Written summarization skills were successfully taught to deaf elementary students via an instructional method which emphasized six elements of story structure (setting, initiating event, internal response, action, consequence, and reaction). (JC)

Reveals that story grammar research has provided educators with new insights into how children comprehend simple stories. Describes evidence for the existence of story schema, presents results of developmental story grammar research, and recommends teaching strategies based on the research. (RWB)

Using an anthropological approach to folklore, the article views children's development of fictional narratives as performances that accentuate prosody. When viewed as performance, the meaning of stories is seen to be not just in the underlying structures, but also in the social and cultural contexts of the story. (Author/DB)

Ten fourth grade language-learning-disabled children and 10 normal peers were shown a movie and subsequently asked to tell the story. Language-disabled subjects told less complex stories. It is concluded that normal subjects used a greater number of story grammar components within each narrative and remembered more aspects of the previously…

Discusses the modern stories for children which are, in their own ways, versions of "Cinderella" changed for modern times. Looks at how this classic tale has influenced modern writers. (MG)

Used story grammar to analyze pretend play productions of 46 children of 4-8 years. Results showed structural parallels between pretend play and stories for 76 percent of subjects. Older subjects' play was episodic and younger subjects' was preepisodic. (RJC)

Describes a recursive transition network model that analyzes and represents a story as a causal network of categorized clauses and labeled relations. Reports on two experiments using procedural criteria to identify inferences and the assumptions that inferences operate over distances in the text and are transitive, resulting in a network…

Investigates manipulating the use of anaphoric relations and text adherence to story grammar rules to produce different conditions of inferencing demands for college-age students. Finds that text learning was more evident in the low-inference group for both passage types. Finds also that subjects in the same group manifested greater accuracy in…

Introduces a multistate probabilistic causal chain notation for describing the knowledge structures implicitly represented by the subjective conditional probability distribution. Proposes a psychological process model of how story comprehension and recall processes operate using causal chain representations. Compares the model's story-recall…

Discusses using index card improvisations to review story structure and characterization with eighth-grade students. Notes that students were quickly able to construct a story that their peers enjoyed. (RS)

Extrapolated data from a 1990 study of 54-month-old children to examine attachment representations. Subjects' story completions were scored for idea units and scriptedness, revealing advanced validity compared to those of younger subjects. Concluded that analysis of cognitive variables may be used to understand attachment representations and their…

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…