This article describes a qualitative research project that examined pen pal letters exchanged between children in Virginia, USA, and Malawi in Sub-Saharan Africa. The goal was to study the nature of communication between students living in these two very different cultural contexts. The results of this study indicated that there were three primary…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…