Increased immigration in Europe and worldwide has led to more pre- and primary school students being educated through the medium of a second language, and there is considerable research, much of it coming from Australia, to suggest that in order to cope with this situation, children will need to begin to acquire, from their earliest years in…

Current cognitive multimedia design theories provide several guidelines on how to integrate verbal and pictorial information. However, the recommendations for the design of auditory texts (narrations) are still fragmentary, especially with regard to the characteristics of the voices used. In the current paper, a fundamental question is addressed,…

The case-based instructional method uses fictionalized or actual narratives as instructional tools to support learning, decision-making, and improved transfer to practical settings. Educational theorists and researchers specializing in case-based instruction have suggested that cases can be made more realistic, engaging, and challenging, thus…

The primary functional role of conversational hand gestures in narrative discourse is disputed. A novel experimental technique investigated whether gestures function primarily to aid speech production by the speaker, or communication to the listener. The experiment involved repeated narration of a cartoon story or stories to a single or multiple…

This phenomenological study describes seven stages of learning to teach at the university level. Through the use of narratives, twelve Canadian university professors reveal their beliefs and attitudes about teaching and learning as they struggle to become better teachers within various academic settings. The purpose of the study was to develop a…

This study examined differences in performance between 20 shy and 20 matched nonshy children on a narrative task and in the way parents scaffolded their narrative performance when reading the wordless book "Frog, Where Are You", by Mercer Mayer. Consistent with previous research, results demonstrated that shy children spoke less than their nonshy…

Sound may hold great promise for instructional software by supporting learning in a variety of ways. Conceptual and preconceptual barriers, however, still appear to prevent software designers from using sound more effectively in their instructional products. Interface books seldom discuss the use of sound and when they do, it is most often simple…

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of…

Previous work applying cognitive load theory has demonstrated the effect of various text/graphic/narration relations on learning using multimedia material. Other work has looked at how the degree of integration between the text and graphics influences their use. This study set out to look at how the degree of integration between text and graphics…

We investigated the conditions under which information 1 day before a novel event influenced 6-year-olds' recall 2 weeks later. In Experiment 1A, four preparation conditions included either the event goals, goals with narration of the event actions and objects, photographs of the objects with goals and narration, or photographs with narration and…

Using participant observation, we describe/interpret the results of teaching a constructivist unit that empowered students in narrative writing and illustration. Participant observation methods included daily note taking, pre-post questioning, and photographing artworks. We analyzed students' stories and illustrations with borrowed and emerging…

The process of disciplinary socialisation has been linked to a gradual mastery of a discipline's genres. This article takes a view of genre, as indexing a wide range of often implicit understandings about knowledge creation and use within a discipline, and as fully rhetorical. Within such a framework, novice and near-expert examples of one…

This article looks at the changing status of narrative in classroom history and the ways in which narrative is introduced in history classes at Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) in England. It includes the views of departmental heads responsible for the history curriculum and other history teachers on the place of narrative in the history curriculum as…

This article compares the first-person narratives of two adolescent girls in the novels "The Rain Catchers" and "The House on Mango Street". I propose that adolescent girls can use literacy to read the world around them as a text and therefore help them to form their own identities enough to ultimately find authority in telling their own stories.…

The paper discusses the pedagogy of the image text, a term that encompasses the graphic novels of Nakazawa and Spiegelman and the heavily illustrated novels of Sebald. Increasingly, artist-authors have turned to the image-text medium to represent catastrophic social events, and these three authors' works are discussed as seminal documents of…