Compositions in the narrative and argumentative modes of discourse were collected from 240 students (40 boys and 40 girls each from grades 6, 10, and 12) and analyzed for mean T-unit length to determine any differences in syntactic complexity across modes of discourse or grade levels. At each grade level, T-unit length was significantly greater in…

A historical narrative relates Atkan traditions as experienced and recalled by an Atkan native who lived from 1890 to 1965. The narrative was recorded in 1952 and translated and transcribed with the help of his daughter. In this booklet, the Atkan dialect is printed on the left-hand pages, and the translation appears opposite on the right-hand…

This article discusses methods of teaching poetry and composition to German speaking elementary-school students in Switzerland. One effective device for treating poetry is enactment; children practice acting, declamation, pantomime, and narration while learning the poem. Another device is choral speaking with individually assigned roles, which…

Findings from fieldwork analyzing children's use of four interactive multimedia programs are compared with a description of early film features and used as the basis to consider problems faced by an audience encountering a nascent medium. Methods adopted to facilitate understanding of films and their suitability for adaptation to multimedia…

A technique for teaching English to English majors in a Taiwan university involves students' oral production of descriptive stories to accompany a piece of classical or folk music. The project provides practice in preparing a report in English, practice in speaking before a group, sensitivity toward and ability to talk about aural stimuli, and…

The storytelling narratives produced by four children, namely, two low-income African-American first-graders and two White middle-class first-graders, were examined using a text analysis technique that organizes lines into the groupings referred to as stanzas. The narratives were based on the viewing of a film. Subtle differences were found in the…

The inferential operations of mildly retarded students reading at the intermediate level were investigated using methods based on discourse comprehension theory. It was hypothesized that problems encountered in reading by these students were related to difficulties in generating logical inferences. Mildly retarded junior high school students and…

The conference papers included in this monograph discuss topics related to early childhood education. Two keynote addresses by Brian Sutton-Smith are presented along with five sectional presentations by other speakers. The first keynote address, concerning the nature of children's stories: (1) argues that adults use stories to indoctrinate…

To explore student facility with argumentative writing, 40 persuasive essays of 5th, 7th, and 11th grade students were analyzed for their relative percentage of reporting (narrating), interpreting, generalizing, and speculative sentences. Fifth and seventh graders were found to use significantly more narrative and fewer generalizations than older…

A study examined the development of discourse cohesion in first language acquisition within a functional and cross-linguistic perspective. The analyses focused on how children introduce new referents in discourse across four languages: English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. The data base consists of narratives produced by children between…

A study investigated the use of a narrative discourse task to test oral English proficiency in non-native speakers for screening and placement. The subjects were Japanese university freshmen entering a five-level course in spoken English. The subjects were shown an animated cartoon of a Japanese folk tale, with narration in Japanese, and later…

This curriculum guide, developed as part of a total English curriculum for pre-kindergarten through grade 10, suggests that students can best understand literature by understanding its recurring external forms or genres, and includes (1) an overview describing the four literary genres of drama, narrative poetry, narrative fiction, and lyric poetry…

Examines differences in oral narrative discourse of adult second-language learners of English on narrative tasks simulating the ability to describe events in the Here-and-Now versus the There-and-Then. Results indicate that complex tasks elicit less fluent, but more accurate and complex narration than do simpler tasks. (90 references) (Author/CK)

Studies learners' second-language (L2) oral proficiency, incorporating an interview, a narration, and a read-aloud. Results show that the nature of the L2 oral construct is not constant. The article concludes that proficiency researchers should use dimensions empirically derived according to the specific elicitation task and audience. (53…

The director of production at Interactive Media Communications discusses its multimedia training models that address health and safety issues. Their purpose is to create entertaining instructional designs to guide the student in an interactive approach. The article describes two CD-ROM products (on hazardous chemicals and safe driving),…