Respectively, three experiments indicate that (1) people can identify all the terminal units in stories as well as different kinds of episodic structure; (2) when attention was focused on the intermediate units, the Goal Path emerged in the judgments; and (3) the same judgments about terminal units were made even when the number of sentences per…

Presents an evaluation of the Houghton Mifflin and Scott Foresman Reading Programs which reveals that stories in both of these series satisfy the requirements of a conventional story grammar. Suggests that such stories help children comprehend and remember the stories they process and serve as excellent models of narrative. (ARH)

Reviews several theoretical perspectives and presents data pertinent to what makes a story likable. Examines the contribution of two story characteristics to adults' and elementary students' ratings of story liking and storyhood: the importance of the goal the protagonist pursues and the difficulty of attaining that goal. (JAD)

Two hearing-impaired students, aged 11 and 12, with differing American Sign Language and English-language skills, participated in a program which instructed them in summarization skills based on a knowledge of story structure. Subjects' knowledge of story structure rose dramatically, and the performance level was maintained in one subject.…

Through story grammar instruction, low-achieving students are discovering that literature can be fun to read and perhaps have application to their own lives. (Author/TE)

An example of reader, writer, and text transaction and interaction may be seen in a study that examined story grammar and applied propositional analysis, cohesive analysis, and miscue analysis to one reader and one text to determine comprehension. A third grade boy read and then retold the story "The Accident." The miscues were marked,…

Educators suggest that children whose families have read to them during their preschool years acquire lexical and syntactic knowledge of sentence-level features typical of written narrative before they begin formal literacy instruction. To test this claim, to discern growth in this knowledge over time and experience, and to describe the lexical…