Emotional shifts in stories are assumed to contribute to narrative persuasion by enhancing engagement with the story. This effect might depend on the congruency of audiences' emotional experience to the emotions implied by the story. In two experiments with well-controlled story manipulations, we compared the persuasive effect of stories with…

Virtual humans are virtual characters within multimedia learning environments designed to aid the learning process. While there is a large variety of research examining how to design the physical appearance of the character or the teaching strategies it should embody, there is comparatively little work around the design of the narrative the…

This dissertation study investigated the comparability of reading comprehension of narrative and persuasive text by applying a convergent parallel mixed method design. Participants were middle school students (Grades 6 - 8, N=6). The purpose of the study was to address a gap in reading comprehension research about how students comprehend narrative…

Although many studies modelled writing quality by analysing basic skills (spelling, grammar, etc.), few focused on top-down compositional strategies at the discourse level. We propose that using both narrative and argument discourse modes in an argumentative essay (a multi-discourse mode [MDM] strategy) capitalizes on their complementary…

The narrative of Christopher Columbus symbolizes core values that are a part of America's national identity. However, the brave adventurism of the Columbus tale only tells part of the story. Historians have brought to light records about Columbus that include violence and enslavement of the Taino people, the principal inhabitants of the Caribbean…

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness,…

Background: Writing is a particularly demanding activity, which poses unique motivational challenges for students. Despite the wealth of research on the relation between writing motivation and writing performance, little is known about the role of students' writing frequency in writing motivation and writing performance. Aims: We aimed to: (1)…

This investigation identified dimensions of narrative, persuasive, and expository writing in Grades 1 to 12 and assessed the contribution of speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) indices to scores on teachers' 6 traits rubric. Findings could facilitate development of effective intervention programs for writing. A corpus of narrative, expository,…