Clinical Question: Do students with language disorders and those who have low language skills benefit more from classroom-based instruction on narratives or from instruction outside of the classroom to improve comprehension of and retelling of narratives? Method: Systematic Review. Search Terms: narrative intervention AND service delivery,…

This study examined the relation between exposure to shared book reading and Spanish-speaking English learners' (ELs'; n = 102) narrative production and comprehension skills in kindergarten (mean age = 6.12 years). Audio- and videotaped book-reading sessions in Spanish were coded in terms of teachers' extratextual talk and gestures. Using a silent…

The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of transcription skills, oral language skills, and executive functions to growth in narrative writing between fourth and sixth grade. While text length and story content of narratives did not increase with age, syntactic complexity of narratives showed a clear developmental progression. Results…

This reflective essay analyzes interactions where food was shared between a teacher and her junior high school students. The author describes the official uses of food in junior high school classrooms and in educational contexts in general. The author then theorizes these interactions, suggesting other semiotic, dialogic, and culturally encoded…

This paper seeks to throw light on the concordance between man's mental structure and the structure of narrative with regard to Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. In so doing, the author first provides the backdrop of the literature on the topic by first explaining Vygotsky's approach to the genesis of mind, and then gives a synoptic account of the…

This research study documents and analyzes the experience of teachers who participated in a professional development program to integrate process drama into the teaching of English language arts, social studies, and world languages and cultures. The study addresses and builds upon extant literature in process drama, arts integration, drama…

Teachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they consider critical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can make better sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they hold the real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge,…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two forms of video modeling: video modeling that includes narration (VMN) and video models without narration (VM) on skill acquisition of four adolescent boys with a primary diagnosis of autism enrolled in an Extended School Year (ESY) summer program. An adapted alternating treatment design…

In this article the authors specifically address the use of narratives in the form of analogies as an experiential learning activity. The use of analogies as an experiential learning tool in multicultural education can be helpful in a number of ways. Analogies provide an alternative tool for processing multicultural topics with students who have…

Narrative has been formally studied for at least two millennia, dating back to the writings of Aristotle. While most theories began by describing the construction of plotlines in theatre, most contemporary research on the structure and comprehension of narratives has examined the discourse of spoken language. However, visual narratives in the form…

This study investigates the naming process of contextually non-categorical objects in children from 3 to 9 plus 13-year-olds. 112 children participated in the study. Children were asked to narrate a story individually while looking at Mercer Mayer's textless, picture book "Frog, where are you?" The narratives were audio recorded and transcribed.…

"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, then we rob our children of tomorrow" (Dewey, 1916). Dewey's words are still relevant today as educators across the world consider how to best connect the print-based literacies of the past to the technologically based literacies of the present. Dewey's advice of re-envisioning how to best teach children…

This report describes the initial automated scoring results that were obtained using the constructed responses from the Writing and Speaking sections of the pilot forms of the "TOEFL Junior"® Comprehensive test administered in late 2011. For all of the items except one (the edit item in the Writing section), existing automated scoring…

Purpose: This paper reports a study that investigated the interactions of six students learning to write narrative essays on an online narrative writing platform (ONWP). Participants were six students and a teacher from an urban Chinese Secondary School in the northern region of Malaysia. Methodology: The qualitative data used in this study were…

The recently released Common Core State Standards increase classroom emphasis on informational texts in high school and recommend a three-part measurement for text complexity when selecting texts for classroom use. In this commentary I argue that fictional narratives can not only meet these stated criteria for complex texts and result in critical…