Narrative Passages Research Articles

Does an activity-based learning strategy improve preschool children's memory for narrative passages?

Abstract Contemporary embodiment theory's indexical hypothesis predicts that engaging in text-relevant activity while listening to a story will: (1) enhance memory for enacted story content; and, (2) result in relatively greater memory enhancement for enacted atypical events than for typical ones ( Glenberg and Robertson, 1999 , Glenberg and Robertson, 2000 ). To date, indexical hypothesis predictions and applications have been examined only with adults and elementary school-aged children. The present study extended previous research by comparing an activity-based listening strategy to a listening-only strategy with 56 preschool children. The first hypothesis was supported in that children in the activity-based condition recalled more story actions than children in the listening-only condition. At the same time, this effect was relatively greater for children who were initially better at remembering story content than for initially poorer story rememberers. Consistent with previous research findings, no statistical differences between conditions were observed on memory for nonaction story content. The second hypothesis – that children in the activity-based strategy would exhibit comparatively greater memory enhancement for atypical story events relative to typical ones – was not supported. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Shakespeare and Narrative

AbstractThis article explores recent critical work on Shakespeare and narrative. This is a particularly apt time for a reconsideration of this topic, not least because of current debates in Shakespeare studies regarding his status as a ‘literary’ dramatist, and a resurgence of critical interest in rhetorical and aesthetic concerns. The article argues that one can discern an ‘anti‐narrative prejudice’ among several twentieth‐century critics, particularly those who argue that Shakespeare's plays are more fully realised on the stage than on the page. Since the 1990s, however, critics have been more positive about Shakespeare's handling of narrative, and in recent years several commentators have noted his interest in ekphrasis– a term that refers to the verbal representation of visual representation, and, more broadly, to vivid narrative description that has the capacity to make us see. Far from being a kind of necessary evil, the narrative passages in Shakespeare's plays are part of a wider interest in rhetoric and the arts of language, and the ability of words to describe, depict and create pictorial effects.

Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s

This essay examines Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner (1991), a rarely discussed novel recounting the experiences of a young Nigerian man living in London. The narrative is written in an experimental style mixing English with Nigerian Pidgin, and including elements of Nigerian English, Black British English, Cockney, and Yoruba. By way of introduction, Agbenugba’s work is briefly discussed in relation to the novel that inspired it, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). An analysis is then undertaken of the interaction between English and Nigerian Pidgin in Another Lonely Londoner, both in dialogue and in narrative passages, with a view to assessing the impact of the combined use of these languages on possible literary interpretations of the novel. The other codes, varieties, and linguistic influences revealed in the book also receive systematic treatment, and it gradually appears that all these elements combine to produce a complex polyphonic work mirroring the main character’s multifarious identity.

Negotiating the reception of stories in conversation

In this article, I explore strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, I begin by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y’know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowed my focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, I discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.

Sketse van ’n pastoraat van narratiewe betrokkenheid in die Lukasevangelie met besondere klem op die Saggeusverhaal

Images of a pastorate of narrative engagement in the Gospel of Luke with special reference to the story of Zacchaeus Important new developments have occurred during the last few decades within practical theology and in particular within pastoral theology. The article illustrates that narrative passages in Scripture can depict the meaning of these newer develop- ments. Images portraying the spiritual life in the Gospel of Luke and in particular the story of Zacchaeus are explored under the headings: background to a pastoral engagement, an eco- hermeneutic approach in a pastorate of narrative engagement, a spiralling pastoral engagement, and stories that fit. The story of a narrative pastoral engagement unfolds in a circular model, integrating paradigmatic-, epistemological- and methodological matters. An eco-hermeneutical approach closely linked to a pastorate of narrative engagement is followed within the desig- nated epistemology. Social constructionism is augmented to become co-constructionism, thus providing for the recognition of truth as revealed in Scripture. Exemplary of this is that in a life-changing metamorphosis, Zacchaeus’ saturated dominant story is replaced by a liberating thickened alternative story.

Some Observations Concerning the Chiastic Structure of the Gospel of Matthew

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 8-9 and 21-2 each contain three structural triads. The former narrative passage contains three sets of three miracles; in the latter passage, another narrative section, we again find three structural triads: three symbolic actions, three parables, and three questions posed to Jesus. According to the structure of the gospel proposed by C. H. Lohr, these two narrative sections lie in chiastic correspondence. This parallel, of three structural triads between two sections which are arguably in chiastic correspondence, lends considerable weight to the argument for the presence of a chiastic structure in the Gospel of Matthew.

Phonological and lexical reading in Italian children with dyslexia

In this study we explore the development of phonological and lexical reading in dyslexic children. We tested a group of 14 Italian children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia and whose reading age is end of grade 1. We compared this group with a group of 70 typically developing children who have been tested for reading at the end of grade 1. For each dyslexic child we also selected a participant who was attending the same grade, was close in age, and showed typical reading development when tested with a narrative passage reading task (Cornoldi, Colpo, & Gruppo MT, 1981) for correctness and reading speed. Children in this group are ''same grade controls.'' We used a reading task consisting of 40 three syllables words. A qualitative and quantitative method of coding children's naming allowed us to distinguish several components of their reading performance: the grapheme and word recognition, the size of orthographic units involved in the aloud orthog- raphy-phonology conversion, the reading process used to recognize words. The comparison of the dyslexic group with the reading age and the same grade control groups reveals different trends of delayed reading processes. Considering dyslexic children's chronological age, lexical reading is greatly delayed. Considering dys- lexic children's reading age, the type of reading process that is more deeply delayed is phonological reading. The rate of fragmented phonological reading (i.e., a type of syllabized phonological reading) is much higher in dyslexic children compared to

Une approche reticulaire de la dynamique temporaire dans les narrations biographiques

Abtract - Reticulated Approach to Temporal Dynamics in Biographic Narratives: This article proposes a specific approach to the analysis of biographic narratives by means of using the social networks perspective. More specifically, and more than other analyses, network formalisation can be used to capture the episodic memory present in narratives. To do so, the notions of environment/episode and of narrative passage are used to connect those features focused on the interaction and the dynamic dimension of narratives. The proposed procedure is illustrated by analyzing a fragment of a narrative interview.

Ability of children with language impairment to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage

Several recent studies have indicated that children with language impairment experience difficulty with various aspects of emotion understanding. Because emotion understanding skills are critical to successful social interaction, it is possible that these deficits play a role in the social problems frequently experienced by children with language difficulties. To explore further the emotion understanding skills of children with language impairment, the investigation examined the ability of these children to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage. Nineteen children with language impairment and their chronological age-matched peers served as participants. Children were sampled from the age range of 8-10; 10 years. These children were presented with a seven-sentence narrative read by actors to express happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. They were then asked to indicate what emotion the speaker expressed. Children with language impairment performed significantly more poorly than their typical peers in identifying the emotion expressed in the passage. There were also differences between emotions, with happiness being the easiest emotion to identify and fear the most difficult. The interaction between group and emotion type was not statistically significant. The results provide additional evidence that children with language impairment may have impairments in emotion understanding. If these findings are replicated, interventions designed to facilitate emotion understanding as an aspect of social communication should be considered for some children with language impairment.

The Effect of Incentives on Cognitive Processing of Text

This study examines the effect of incentives, a motivational manipulation, on cognitive processes of reading. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through the use of monetary incentives to assess its effect on information processing in reading. One group of college students was paid for what they remembered from several narrative passages they read, whereas another group of college students was not offered an incentive. Motivated participants had longer reading times and better recall performance than did participants who were not extrinsically motivated. When reading was constrained at a fixed pace, motivated participants still performed better, with no interaction effect between pacing and motivational status. Therefore, the observed enhanced memory performance of motivated readers was not attributable to additional time spent on reading, indicating that efficient processes that do not influence reading time are involved. The results corroborate observations that extrinsic motivation, in the form of incentives, may lead to increased reading achievement and suggest memory processes are involved in this link.

Improving Native American children’s listening comprehension through concrete representations

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children’s memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 424–436.] could be extended to the text processing of Native American children. Forty-five third through seventh-grade students with academic learning difficulties listened to four narrative passages under one of three instructional conditions: manipulate, where students moved toy objects to represent the story’s content; visual, where students observed the results of an experimenter’s toy manipulations; and free-study, where students thought about the content of the presented story sentences. Findings were consistent with the literature documenting the comprehension and memory benefits of text-relevant concrete representations, with students in the manipulate and visual conditions statistically outrecalling students in the free-study condition. In contrast to the results of the Glenberg et al. (2004) reading study, no conditions-related differences were observed on a final passage where students were instructed to generate internal visual images of story events in the absence of external visual support (i.e., when no toys were present).

Inhabiting her space

Reflecting on interview-narratives and exilic poetry, this article is focused on the lived experiences of Iranian-American women in the context of migration and exile after the incursion of the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Iranian women in the USA have experienced the challenging geo-cultural journey that eventually, and at times significantly, distanced them from the culture of their place of birth and prepared them to embrace new multi-layered and composite spaces of identity and belonging. The article is based on in-depth interviews with twenty-five Iranian women immigrants. The focus of the inquiry is on developing a theoretical framework to understand the physical, psychological and emotional challenges of exile and displacement for this population, grounded in the exilic narratives of the women interviewed, as well as in the expression of three Iranian-American women poets. The analysis emphasizes the narrative and poetic passages as repositories of identity and belonging, and deconstructs these texts as epitomes of in-betweenness in the light of post-colonial and feminist theories.

Speech reporting and the suppression of orality in seventeenth-century Russian trial dossiers

In comparison with Russian trial transcripts of the fifteenth century, trial transcripts of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show a drift toward compact, writer-based reporting styles. In an earlier study (Collins 2001), I suggested that this happened because of significant changes in legal institutions. From being primarily oral confrontations, trials became battles of documents filed in chanceries and scrutinized by bureaucrats oriented to the written word; concomitantly, the transcripts became dossiers of documents literally glued together and framed by short narrative passages, including reports of dialogue. In the present study I examine a representative sample of these trial dossiers to demonstrate the link between reporting and discourse-organization strategies and chancery practices. First, I discuss how the dossiers are arranged into episodes graphically and syntactically. Second, I investigate the methods of speech reporting utilized in the trial dossiers and the contextual motivation for the choice of one method over another.

Torey Hayden’s teacher lore: classroom behavior management of children with emotional and behavioral disorders

Torey Hayden’s portrayal of classroom behavior management in her teacher lore, autobiographical writings about teaching children with emotional and behavioral disorders, is examined. Five of her books were sampled: One child, Somebody else’s kids, Just another kid, Ghost girl and Beautiful child. Each of these books unfolds within the space of an elementary age, self‐contained classroom for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Each technique Hayden used to respond to her students’ problem behaviors in the five books was categorized according to Fritz Redl’s theory on managing behavior problems. Redl identified five strategies educators can use to handle their students’ behavior problems: changing, managing, tolerating, preventing and accommodating. The methodology used to categorize Hayden’s techniques was analogous to constant comparative analysis of documents. Hayden is portrayed through Redl’s strategies as a teacher who relies on managing without consequences and changing techniques. Narrative passages illustrating these techniques are presented. The roles of altruism and student empowerment in Hayden’s storied model of classroom management are presented. Implications for Hayden as a role model for teachers of children with emotional and behavioral disorders are discussed.

Processing Narratives for Verbatim and Gist Information by Adults with Language Learning Disabilities: A Functional Neuroimaging Study

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half without (control group) received functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Participants were instructed to listen to narrative passages for either the exact wording or the general meaning of the narratives and respond to questions about the narratives. These conditions were contrasted with listening to randomly arranged sentences. Adults in the HLD group responded to test questions less accurately than the control group. Likewise, the HLD group showed physiological differences during both narrative and sentence processing in comparison to the control group. Both groups showed differences in processing narratives for gist versus verbatim information, which involved activation centered over the right precentral sulcus. The results support the notion that distinct aspects of verbal processing draw differentially on a distributed physiological network and that adults selected for HLD show both behavioral and physiological differences on narrative processing tasks. However, these differences are not necessarily qualitative in nature.

What is an action-based model of interpretation?

Scholars of linguistic meaning have always talked about sentences in terms of the things that they instruct their interpreters to do, find or check, and so the idea of an action-based model of interpretation is not entirely new. In denotational or ‘realist’ semantics, a sentence tells its interpreter how to determine its truth or falsity. In representational semantics, a sentence tells its interpreter to retrieve an array of semantic frames and make them fit together. When denotational semanticists started paying attention to narratives, they found an ingenious way to combine the representationalist idea of meaning as the integration of knowledge structures with the realist's view of meaning as truth conditions: they proposed that a sentence, rather than merely having a truth value, has a truth interval – the time for which it is true (Herweg 1991) – and that the interpreter can use linguistic and extralinguistic cues to determine whether or not two truth intervals overlap. Sometimes, however, the necessary contextual cues are lacking. For example, the English past tense, unlike its French analog, is aspectually neutral; therefore, the narrative passage in (1) is ambiguous:

Discourse Formulation in Children With Closed Head Injury

In this study, narrative and expository discourse-retelling abilities were compared in 9 children with closed head injury (CHI) age 9;5-15;3 (years;months) and 9 typically developing age-matched peers. Narrative and expository retellings were analyzed according to language variables (i.e., number of words, number of T-units, and sentential complexity) and information variables (i.e., number of propositions, number of episodic structure elements, and number of global structure elements). A measure of participants' ability to generate a story moral or aim was also taken. The children with CHI differed significantly from their age-matched peers across language and information domains and in their ability to formulate a moral or aim in both the expository and narrative retellings. In addition, differences across genre were found with performance on narrative tasks superior to performance on expository tasks. The exception was that it was easier for participants to generate an aim for the expository passage than a story moral for the narrative passage. The results are discussed relative to a working memory theory of impairment following CHI. Future directions for research are proposed.

Two Mandarin readers in Taiwan: characteristics of children with higher and lower reading proficiency levels

This study investigated how two readers of Mandarin with differing reading‐proficiency skills interacted with a narrative passage, as well as what knowledge they brought to and made use of while reading the text. The perspectives of reading comprehension, transactional theory and social‐cognitive models of reading served as this study's theoretical framework. Two Sixth‐Grade participants were selected for inclusion through snowball sampling. The data in this study were obtained from interviews and think‐alouds. Qualitative analysis indicated that the skilled Mandarin reader's stance moved along the efferent/aesthetic continuum, while the less‐skilled Mandarin reader's was mainly efferent. The skilled reader employed strategies of inferencing, summarisation and synthesis during and after reading, while the less‐skilled reader applied bridging inferences, paraphrasing and repetition. The findings of this study corroborate previous findings that proficient readers employ more sophisticated approaches to reading than less‐proficient readers.

Wagner and the Romantic Hero. By Simon Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 193. $75 cloth.

Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.

Claude Simon: allées et venues — Actes du colloque international de Perpignan, 14–15 mars 2003

Études réunies par Jean-Yves Laurichesse. Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2004. 266 pp. Pb €15.00. Like so many conference proceedings, this edited volume offers a very focused collection of angles on the subject in question — Claude Simon's most recent novel Le Tramway (2001) — and as such provides a useful introduction to this work. In the prefatory remarks, Jean-Yves Laurichesse pinpoints the rich resonance of the title of Simon's latest novel as ‘à la fois machine mémorable et riche métaphore […] le fil conducteur du colloque’. Indeed, the three sections of the volume entitled ‘mobiles’, ‘passages’ and ‘histoires’ take up this resonance to cover various aspects of Simon's Le Tramway. Whether literal or figurative ‘transports’, narrative passage or digression, whether movement or circular stasis, familial or universalizing image of death of the generations who have gone before, all these are central preoccupations of the novel and its critics in this volume. Where the collection's focus is a strength, its weakness is uneven critical quality and depth. Although there is some range and effort to connect Le Tramway to Simon's œuvre (for example, in the last essay by Didier Alexandre, ‘Du Tricheur au Tramway, d'un événement l'autre?’, or Alastair Duncan's ‘Allées et venues familiales chez Claude Simon’, the first essay in the section ‘Histoires’), comparison is more commonly to wider issues, theories and fields. Wolfram Nitsch's opening essay explores forms of transport in the modernist novel with Le Tramway then read in the heritage of Huysmans, the Goncourts, Proust, Aragon, Leiris and so on, while Jean Duffy uses Simon's latest work to illustrate a small (and arguably rather arbitrary) selection of anthropological texts on rite and rites of passage. Metka Zupančič's essay, entitled ‘Hermès psychopompe: le “comme” des palimpsestes’, continues her interest in mythocritical approaches to reading text, but is probably the worst offender of the volume for its over-reliance on theory as a grille imposed on Simon's text in ways which many will find highly questionable. Given that most of the contributors here have a track record of publication on Simon, the lack of secondary critical reference to the many previous articles on Simon treating the themes and formal elements covered in this volume may be a particular disappointment to researchers on Simon. In all, then, this is an energetic, but rather superficial, collection of essays in unanimous critical agreement that Le Tramway is indeed representative of the concerns of Simon's œuvre.