A study investigated the effects of presentation mode and type of content on young children's recall of nouns in a scripted narrative. Forty-nine children in the second month of first grade were presented a fictional narrative in which were embedded 18 target nouns classified as high-scripted, medium-scripted, or low-scripted. Subjects then viewed…

Two interventions were studied in this project: a drama program presented by three visiting drama consultants in five classes and a daily story-reading period presented by the teacher in three classes and by the co-investigator in another three classes. The interventions lasted for 12 weeks. Subjects were 325 first grade pupils from 21 classrooms…

Dialogue from 30-minute samples from "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" was coded for grammar, content, and discourse. Grammatical analysis used the LINGQUEST computer-assisted language assessment program (Mordecai, Palen, and Palmer 1982). Content coding was based on categories developed by Rice (1984) and…

A study examined the effect of reading ability on 60 seventh-grade students' narrative writing quality, use of descriptive and evaluative t-units, use of storytelling linguistic cues, degree of revision, and between draft self-assessing inferences about intentions, problems in fulfilling intentions, and predicted revisions. Subjects wrote two…

Some preliminary ideas on narrative inquiry in educational studies and educational reform are presented. Illustrations from Bay Street School (drawn from a 9-year research project on personal knowledge and narrative) are included. Since whatever may be said about narrative as method follows from its character as phenomenon, the aspects of…

This analysis of the structure of children's narratives deals with material gathered from 96 children, aged 3 1/2 to 9 1/2 years, in conversations about events in which they were personally involved. Elements of the narratives and the structural relationship of these elements are examined. Three elements are discerned: (1) chronological…

In order to ascertain the effect of different demands on cognitive processes as reflected in speech rate, pause and hesitation phenomena, 90 young men, 45 native speakers of English (U.S.A.) and 45 native speakers of Spanish (Mexico), were asked to retell a story presented in one of three ways: (1) film plus narration; (2) film only; (3) narration…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

A Sample of 576 children participated in a study to determine the manner in which children retain narrative material, what information they retain, and the effects of sex and age upon these aspects of memory. The children, ranging in age from six to eight years, listened to a tape recorded story in individual sessions. Half of them were asked to…

This paper argues that the ideas people hold about teaching literary genres are out-of-date, that fictions of the imagination have been taken over by the media, which turn everything into entertainment and do not allow reflection. Student narratives are suggested as a way of incorporating personal narrative as a literary genre in order to create…

The publications of the Marvel Comics Group warrant serious consideration as a legitimate narrative enterprise. While it is obvious that these comic books can be used in the classroom as a source of reading material, it is not so obvious that these comic books, with great economy, simplicity, and narrative density, can be used to further introduce…

This is the fourth and final report in a series dealing with the impact of the modes of discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) on written syntactic complexity at the elementary school level. The first three reports dealt in turn with the three grade levels involved in the study (third, fourth, and fifth grades). This…

This research examines the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. A process model for the comprehension of stories is proposed which assumes that stories are encoded in a hierarchical organizational framework which represents the abstract structural relationships of the plot. The implications of…

To point out some inadequacies in the usual ways of studying and teaching literature, to emphasize that books exist primarily to be read by individual human beings, and to explore some of the questions which arise when it is seriously acknowledged that books require individual readers and readings, the author of this volume demonstrates that…

A course putting emphasis on the enjoyment of poetry is presented. It includes an introduction to poetic language and a study of various types of poetry, such as the lyric and the narrative. Performance objectives include: (1) The student will write an original, personal definition of the form of poetry; (2) The student will define a list of terms…