This article exposes the problem of using declarative rather than procedural knowledge to help K--12 students recognize irony in stories. It offers commonplace procedures drawn from students' everyday language experience together with more abstract irony clues to help students recognize irony in stories and increase their story comprehension.…

Purpose: Momentum around the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in US K-12 classrooms is increasing. Opponents have argued that Ethnic Studies does not challenge students academically and prepare them for high stakes testing (Planas, 2012; Sanchez, 2007). Conversely, research continues to show ways Ethnic Studies contribute to students'…

Librarians, teachers, authors, video game designers, corporate executives, in fact all providers of information struggle with the dilemma of how to get consumers of information engaged with their message. School librarians know that engaged students learn more and retain the information longer; authors and game designers want their readers and…

A three-stage lesson sequence that used story grammars to teach plot development has been proved successful with a group of eight above average third grade students reading Deborah and James Howe's "Bunnicula." The first stage was a training unit designed to familiarize children with a typical story grammar's parts: a theme and plot…

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

Encourages the use of storytelling in the classroom as a method for developing verbal, written, and reading skills, as well as non-verbal communication skills. Offers guidelines and specific activities for involving students in storytelling. (RAE)

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)

Discusses how beginning readers respond to familiar and unfamiliar stories. States that children begin as inventive readers, using different strategies--such as naming, counting, or structuring--to "read" the text. (MM)

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,…