Until students have opportunities to discover the power of personal expression through writing in the narrative mode, it is dangerous to teach them writing solely in terms of institutional discourse. The goals of institutional prose, or professional writing, are not determined by the writer, and often demand an "objective" style that…

Panola County, Texas Sheriff Corbett Akins wrote a weekly column for the "Panola Watchman" in which he chronicled the adventures and mishaps of his force. He provides a wealth of information about East Texas life on everything from making fiddles, to running bloodhounds, to finding moonshine stills. The columns reprinted appeared from…

A study measured the effects that direct instruction in narrative text structure using a story map (called "macrostruction") had on the comprehension of average and above average sixth-grade readers. A 2 x 2 x 2 repeated measures design was used with time, text, and treatment as the independent variables. The number of story grammar idea…

The paper, originally given at a 1986 Ethnic and Multicultural Symposium, reviews the language demands of schools and difficulties with conventional language proficiency measures in predicting the academic achievement of language minority children. It is suggested that language assessment include the assessment of syntactic competencies as well as…

Court trials are formalized disputes in which the parties are denied confrontation and have restrictions placed on their rights to tell the story. The rights of telling are part of discourse rights, and in the courtroom they are circumscribed by attorneys' objections to either the other attorneys' questions or the witnesses' answers. This can be…

Most writers of feminist biographies do not yet know how to solve presentational and narrative problems that have been solved in other genres. (JH)

Asserting that the literature of a people grows organically out of their experiences, this discussion focuses successively on folk tales and folk sons, stated to be the most important of the earliest forms of black literature in America; the Spiritual, stated to be the Black literary form which has proven most enduring; black English; slave…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

Composing oral poems and storytelling are two exercises that speech teachers can use in oral interpretation courses. Conducting the oral poetry exercise early in an introductory interpretation course allows students to become acquainted with each other and to encourage each other while sharing something of themselves with the entire class. This…

Nine preschool children viewed a videotaped story at regular intervals in a longitudinal study of their understanding of a televised narrative. Observations focused on children's attention to the story, their reactions during viewing, and their postviewing story reconstructions. It was found that the children sensed certain interpersonal conflicts…

This curriculum guide is intended to introduce fifth and sixth grade children to narrative prose and verse. The guide includes analyses of, suggested activities for, and questions about Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat That Walked by Himself," Jack London's "The Story of Keesh," Ernest Thompson Seton's "The Springfield Fox"…

Comprehensibility ratings and sentence-by-sentence reading times of three-sentence narratives (triples) were studied as a function of the coherence of a triple. In both experiments, reading times did not differ for first sentences, but were longer for third sentences of unrelated than for related triples. (Author/RM)

Examines audience perceptions of which values characterize soap operas in general and which values distinguish daytime from prime-time offerings. Indicates meaningful differences between daytime soaps and prime-time serial dramas. Considers the implications of the empirical method guided by critical concerns and results for media scholars of…

Illustrates the use of narratology to help foreign language students see the interplay between form and content in their target language literature. (CB)

The descriptions of a terrorist attack on a Paris restaurant--an audio recording of a juvenile eyewitness, an audio recording of a researcher reading a text about the event, and a newspaper account--are compared for discourse characteristics. (MSE)