Ethnographic research projects have surged in recent years and are well represented in Research in the Teaching of English (RTE) bibliographies. However, methods texts were written for social scientists and anthropologists, not for writing researchers. Methods texts and rhetoric programs' general grounding in positivistic research imply that…

Designed as a criterion-referenced scale to describe levels of writing skill development for basic essay elements, this instrument provides separate six-point rating scales for general competence of a narrative essay and the levels of development of focus and organization, support, and grammar/mechanics. The mechanics scale includes a brief guide…

Today, abstract exposition has lost its power to persuade; attitudes are changed by the narrative techniques of the media and the new journalism. (JH)

This study examined interaction between non-referential gesture and discourse-structuring linguistic devices in the development of metanarrative ability. Specifically, the development of the interaction between beat gestures and all metanarrative devices was analyzed in 9 children aged 5-6, 8-9, 11-12, and in 3 adults. Subjects viewed a cartoon…

Until students have opportunities to discover the power of personal expression through writing in the narrative mode, it is dangerous to teach them writing solely in terms of institutional discourse. The goals of institutional prose, or professional writing, are not determined by the writer, and often demand an "objective" style that…

Panola County, Texas Sheriff Corbett Akins wrote a weekly column for the "Panola Watchman" in which he chronicled the adventures and mishaps of his force. He provides a wealth of information about East Texas life on everything from making fiddles, to running bloodhounds, to finding moonshine stills. The columns reprinted appeared from…

A study measured the effects that direct instruction in narrative text structure using a story map (called "macrostruction") had on the comprehension of average and above average sixth-grade readers. A 2 x 2 x 2 repeated measures design was used with time, text, and treatment as the independent variables. The number of story grammar idea…

The paper, originally given at a 1986 Ethnic and Multicultural Symposium, reviews the language demands of schools and difficulties with conventional language proficiency measures in predicting the academic achievement of language minority children. It is suggested that language assessment include the assessment of syntactic competencies as well as…

Court trials are formalized disputes in which the parties are denied confrontation and have restrictions placed on their rights to tell the story. The rights of telling are part of discourse rights, and in the courtroom they are circumscribed by attorneys' objections to either the other attorneys' questions or the witnesses' answers. This can be…

Most writers of feminist biographies do not yet know how to solve presentational and narrative problems that have been solved in other genres. (JH)

Asserting that the literature of a people grows organically out of their experiences, this discussion focuses successively on folk tales and folk sons, stated to be the most important of the earliest forms of black literature in America; the Spiritual, stated to be the Black literary form which has proven most enduring; black English; slave…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

Composing oral poems and storytelling are two exercises that speech teachers can use in oral interpretation courses. Conducting the oral poetry exercise early in an introductory interpretation course allows students to become acquainted with each other and to encourage each other while sharing something of themselves with the entire class. This…

Nine preschool children viewed a videotaped story at regular intervals in a longitudinal study of their understanding of a televised narrative. Observations focused on children's attention to the story, their reactions during viewing, and their postviewing story reconstructions. It was found that the children sensed certain interpersonal conflicts…