This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6-8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential…

This study describes the use of story stems in order to determine children's representations of relationships with mothers, teachers, and friends, and how these representations are related to mother- and teacher-rated social competence. Thirty preschool-aged children were administered the story stem tasks featuring three different interactional…

Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

Speaking a language involves more than simply knowing the linguistic components of the message, and developing language skills requires more than grammatical comprehension and vocabulary memorization. In teaching-learning processes, drama method may have some positive effects on ELL students' speaking fluency and accuracy. This study attempts to…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Bahamas was simultaneously celebrated and denounced in the US. Damaging facts about Columbus and the impact of his voyages were aired along with demands for truth and change. This study analyzes the power relationships and political ideology of picturebooks about Columbus published…

Background: Children diagnosed with intellectual difficulties experience difficulties with narrative skills, due to limited syntactic knowledge. The Colourful Semantics approach with thematic roles and a colour coding system may encourage syntactic development in children experiencing intellectual disabilities. Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the components, usability, and feasibility of a new Read it Again-Dual Language curriculum (RIA-DL; Durán et al. n.d.). The RIA-DL is based on the Read it Again-PreK! (Justice and McGinty 2009) and adapted to meet the unique needs of Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers. The curriculum targets…

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line…

Narratives that capture children's learning as they go about their day-to-day activities are promoted as a powerful assessment tool within early childhood settings. However, in the New Zealand context, there is increasing concern that learning stories--the preferred form of narrative assessment--currently downplay domain knowledge. In this paper,…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

Evidence is accumulating that the level of text comprehension is dependent on the situatedness and sensory richness of a child's mental representation formed during reading. This study investigated whether these factors involved in text comprehension also serve a functional role in writing a narrative. Direct influences of situatedness and sensory…

Task repetition facilitates learners' performance, at least temporarily: Since learners are already familiar with the content of the task at the initial enactment, they are capable of focusing their attention on linguistic form during the following enactment. However, the analysis in previous studies treated various aspects of "form" as…

This experimental investigation evaluated the impact of educational songs on a child's ability to recall scientific content from an educational television program. Preschoolers' comprehension of the educational content was examined by measuring children's ability to recall the featured science content (the function of a pulley and…

This article aims to uncover how L2 writing is affected by alignment, a socio-cognitive process involving dynamic coordination and adaptation. For this, two studies were conducted. Study 1 required two groups of 24 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to continue in English two stories with their endings removed, both of which had a…