The present paper is supposed to compare and contrast three of these masterpieces written the Renaissance period. The epyllions under study are Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," Thomas Lodge's "Scylla's Metamorphosis" and Francis Beaumont's "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus." Bush believes that "the influence…

This essay explores the theme of the double in Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before," Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and Zivko Chingo's "The Big Water." While traditionally the double is connected with the evil alter-ego of the protagonist, what brings these three works together (by an Italian, English and…

In this article we analyze how a group of Catalan students (aged 11-13, N = 245) narrate the history of Catalonia and we compare their narratives with the official Catalan narrative. From an interpretative approach, we collect data by requiring the students to write down what they remember about the history of Catalonia. The research is conducted…

This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. The results of the…

Many films are based on novels. However, each of them uses different ways to tell the similar stories. The paper discusses the differences from several aspects in terms of their nature, ways of narration, as well as the effect they bring about. It mainly focuses on the special benefits of using films in English language teaching. Finally, a sample…

This project examined the words selected for instruction from fourth-grade English/Language Arts (ELA) and science programs with the goal of describing the unique words in these two text types. Seven features of the words were established: (a) length, (b) frequency, (c) frequency of a word's morphological family, (d) familiarity, (e) dispersion…

This study examined differences in performance between 20 shy and 20 matched nonshy children on a narrative task and in the way parents scaffolded their narrative performance when reading the wordless book "Frog, Where Are You", by Mercer Mayer. Consistent with previous research, results demonstrated that shy children spoke less than their nonshy…

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of…

This study investigates the differences in children's comprehension and enjoyment of storybooks according to the medium of presentation. Two different storybooks were used and 132 children participated. Of these, 51 children read an extract from "The Magicians of Caprona," about half reading an electronic version with an online dictionary, and the…

Children with ADHD have difficulty understanding causal connections and goal plans within stories. This study examined mediators of group differences in story narrations between children ages 7-9 with and without ADHD, including as potential mediators both the core deficits of ADHD (i.e., inattention, disinhibition, planning/working memory) as…

The National Center for Accessible Media has developed a technology and protocol for inserting extended, enhanced descriptions of visually based concepts into artificially paused digital video. These "eDescriptions" describe material not fully explained by a narrator and provide analogies and explanation specifically designed for…

Communication breakdowns occurring in the speech of seven language learning-disabled children (aged 9-11) were examined in conversation and narration and compared to normal peers. Length of communication unit and rate of communication breakdowns per communication unit were greater in narration than conversation compared to controls. No differences…

The "Writing What You Read" (WWYR) rubric was designed for large-scale assessments, and differs from most narrative rubrics in its narrative-specific content and its developmental framework. The rubric contains five analytic subscales for theme, character, setting, plot, and communication, and a sixth holistic scale for overall…

Ten head-injured adults were compared to normal adults on a narrative picture description task. Subjects were similar in amount of pertinent content expressed, narrative length, and rate of speech, but were significantly slower in rate of information imparted as they required lengthier and slower verbal outputs to convey essential information.…

Research on children with normal hearing shows that the word-processed narratives they produce are better than their hand-written narratives. Hearing children come to school with prior experience in narrating stories, and in school they learn to transfer this to written narrative form. However, children who are deaf and hard of hearing have less…