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…

Aim of this study is to determine the effect of narrative and informative text types on Reading Comprehension levels of Primary Education 4th and 5th grade students. Application was fulfilled in 2011-2012 academic year with 134 students in a primary education school in Province Kirsehir. Reading comprehension tests prepared according to text types…

This study explored how designers "perceived" and "used" narrative during the creation of an educational video game. A qualitative, ethnographic, single case study approach was used to collect and analyze data pertaining to the narrative design trajectory of the game design team as well as Citizen Science, the game artifact…

This article examines how narrative strategies of indirection employed in "Los cirineos" and "La argolla" engage the reader's ethical participation in examining and questioning societal norms concerning sex and marriage. In "Los cirineos," the opposition between the moral and the immoral is broken down by the presence of what Shlomith Rimmon Kenan…

This study examines the effects of foreign language learning context (three-month study-abroad; versus "at-home" instruction) and age (10-11-year-old children versus university students) on the development of effective foreign language communication strategies (CS) in monologue production. Participants (N = 95) were all Spanish/Catalan…

Digital Storytelling offers many advantages for language learning, especially within a project-based framework. In this article, the use of Digital Micro-Narratives is proposed as particularly useful for second language learners at the novice level. As a sub-genre of Digital Storytelling, Digital Micro-Narratives focus more on frequently updated…

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure…

The present study examined the extent to which preschool classroom supports--relational support (RS) and instructional support (IS)--are associated with children's language development and whether these associations vary as a function of children's language ability. The language skills of 360 children within 95 classrooms were assessed using an…

This review presents a synthesis of the state of arts-based management education scholarship, with teaching and research recommendations. To begin, the lack of creativity and empathy development in management students is presented. Next, literature-based descriptions of arts-based management exercises focus on how to use improvisational theatre,…

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…