Conversational and narrative language samples were elicited from 16 school-age individuals with mental retardation and 16 typically developing children matched for mental age. Analysis demonstrated that both groups produced more syntactically complex language during narration, whereas they were more talkative during conversation. Results support…

Discusses the idea of narrative being central to all human experience. Asserts that Piagetian theory and other developmental approaches limit the place of art in early childhood education. Recommends exposing young children to folk art and music that represent significant cultural traits. (CFR)

Discusses the history of low tolerance for different cultures and general ethnocentrism in schools in the United States. Seeks to determine if story telling and interpretation of a story by first graders in a suburban Chicago public school could stimulate interest in and expression of positive feelings for persons from a cultural background…

Examines the ways that adult narrators address the child reader in fictions written for children in moral education. Analyzes these relationships and considers their pedagogical implications. Specifically considers the personification of children's behavior by animals in these stories and connects this to a shift in the contemporary concept of…

This research examined 2 strategies for encouraging children's narratives. Twenty-five European American and 31 African American children from low-income backgrounds (M age = 4.76) participated. Children were assigned randomly to either high or low elaborative narrative style conditions and to either a draw-and-tell or tell-only reporting…

A "science of e-learning" involves the scientific investigation of how people learn in electronic learning environments. Three elements of a science of e-learning are: a) "evidence"--a base of replicated findings from rigorous and appropriate research studies; b) "theory"--a research-based theory of how people learn in electronic learning…

Computer games are no longer just for entertainment; they have also become a useful instructional strategy for acquiring knowledge. When games are used for purposes other than strict entertainment they become serious games. The goal of serious games is to enable the player to learn a task, master a strategy or develop a skill. Serious games can be…

This is the first of two related documents reporting a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade class as a developmental link between students' natural competence in oral conversation and their developing competence in written language. The first section of the report discusses (1) the purpose of the…

A year-long study of the writing growth of eight seventh grade children was conducted to determine whether knowledge of reading rhetoric could be directly applied to personal writing behavior. It was assumed that active comprehension of a distinctive literary model would provide awareness of the structure of narrative prose and improve the…

A study of children's syntax from a transformational perspective was initiated to explore the following areas: syntactic differences between narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative writing, and the relation of these differences to IQ, sex, and reading comprehension; the relation of syntax content; and the relation of children's…

Compositions in the narrative and argumentative modes of discourse were collected from 240 students (40 boys and 40 girls each from grades 6, 10, and 12) and analyzed for mean T-unit length to determine any differences in syntactic complexity across modes of discourse or grade levels. At each grade level, T-unit length was significantly greater in…

A historical narrative relates Atkan traditions as experienced and recalled by an Atkan native who lived from 1890 to 1965. The narrative was recorded in 1952 and translated and transcribed with the help of his daughter. In this booklet, the Atkan dialect is printed on the left-hand pages, and the translation appears opposite on the right-hand…

This article discusses methods of teaching poetry and composition to German speaking elementary-school students in Switzerland. One effective device for treating poetry is enactment; children practice acting, declamation, pantomime, and narration while learning the poem. Another device is choral speaking with individually assigned roles, which…

Findings from fieldwork analyzing children's use of four interactive multimedia programs are compared with a description of early film features and used as the basis to consider problems faced by an audience encountering a nascent medium. Methods adopted to facilitate understanding of films and their suitability for adaptation to multimedia…

A technique for teaching English to English majors in a Taiwan university involves students' oral production of descriptive stories to accompany a piece of classical or folk music. The project provides practice in preparing a report in English, practice in speaking before a group, sensitivity toward and ability to talk about aural stimuli, and…