Discusses the use of Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways with Words" in teacher education courses. Suggests that an important part of the meaning lies in the rhetorical form. Uses Bakhtin's analysis of the "adventure novel of everyday life" to illuminate Heath's use of form. (EVL)

Argues that focusing on film adaptations helps students view literature from an interdisciplinary perspective and gain insight into narrative technique. (PRA)

Demonstrates how narrative perspectives provide means of conceptualizing brief psychotherapy following negative life outcomes. Representative case studies illustrate three types of narrative construction following adverse experiences and show how narrative perspectives shift focus from disability and dysfunction to concern for client strengths,…

Provides different, somewhat unconventional and provisional answers to some concerns about narrative, its place in explanation and argument, its relationship to description, its function in storytelling, "its role in the self in coming to terms with itself," its role "as the vicar of culture," and its role in fictive literature. (RS)

Explores what effects pictures have on the concepts of immediate-engaging, distant-engaging, and distancing first-person narration. Considers how a pictorialized (as opposed to an illustrated) narrative involves different dynamics of engagement than a purely verbal narrative. (SG)

This study examined the relationship between event representation and linguistic expression in narratives of 31 children and adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) and controls matched for either mental age, syntax comprehension, or expressive language. Use of linguistic devices and cohesion were poorer in DS subjects than MA- matched controls with…

This article begins by contrasting the popularity of biography in the general culture with the neglect of literary biography as a branch of literary studies. The argument follows from the hybrid character of a genre in which history is crossed with narrative. Using concepts drawn from narratology, it shows how biography's handling of life stories…

In their "Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity", Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak articulate the promise of story or narrative in defining identity as an analytic tool in sociocultural research on learning. The article strives toward a process-rich notion of identity that responds…

Mary Norton's "The Borrowers" has a complicated narrative framework, through which the story of the small people, the Borrowers, is told. Once we find that the embedded story is carefully set at the turn of the nineteenth century, parallels with Burnett's "The Secret Garden" are recognized, in which a lonely Anglo-Indian child experiences some…

Since Asperger's Syndrome was formally recognised in 1994, several novels featuring characters with the syndrome have appeared. Bill Greenwell's article discusses these books in providing a context for a closer consideration of the British publishing sensation of 2003, Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." The reasons…

This article presents a rhetorical analysis of a Mexican woman's oral narrative performance using a discourse studies and interactional sociolinguistics framework. The results of the analysis suggest that the discursive practice of the oral narrative and that of academic discourse share certain rhetorical features. These features are (a) the…

Hollis Sigler was an artist, teacher, and activist. Her works seductively invite us to consider fantasies and challenge to confront the monsters. Sigler's narrative artwork after 1991 focused almost exclusively on issues relating to her and her family's history with breast cancer. It purposefully calls into question the capricious nature of life…

During the past two decades, the popularity of computer and video games has prompted games to become a source of study for educational researchers and instructional designers investigating how various aspects of game design might be appropriated, borrowed, and re-purposed for the design of educational materials. The purpose of this paper is to…

How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critical importance in accomplishing this…

The educational publisher Pearson/Scott-Foresman in 2006 introduced curriculum to address California History/Social Studies standards. Fifth grade students have difficulty comprehending non-fiction text that is informative enough to have historical accuracy. The publisher promotes a program that features a standard in every lesson, and promises no…