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This study investigated how 12 Taiwanese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) college students comprehended and interpreted 4 English short stories. Free writing was used to collect the data, and a topical unit was used to analyze the data. The results identified two patterns: the comprehension level and the interpretation level. The comprehension level was divided into three categories: summarizing, elaborating, and inferring. The interpretation level was also divided into three categories: evaluating, associating, and transferring. The comprehension level helped participants understand the text, but the interpretation level helped participants become critical thinkers and readers. The pedagogical implications suggest that ESL/EFL teachers should broaden their views of reading instruction and, furthermore, should provide a rich learning environment for students to make personal, sensible, and meaningful connections through a social inquiry process. (Contains 11 references.) (Author/SM)

This paper describes an advanced English course at a Mexican university entitled, "Short Science Fiction Stories in English." The course is based on an ecological, co-emergent approach in which the various components of curriculum action are understood to exist in a dynamic and mutually specifying relationship. With this conceptual approach, the course provides enriching transcultural encounters. The paper describes the theoretical-methodological framework of the course, its objectives, the choice of the short story, the syllabus, class management, and evaluation policy. Science fiction provides university students with a vision of the impact that science and technology project on society from the Anglophone point of view, offering spaces for critical transcultural encounters. The course's three objectives include stimulating appreciation and enjoyment of literature in English, offering a critical analysis of the manifestations of Anglophone cultures as they are revealed in science fiction, and promoting the improvement and diversification of English knowledge and competence. Students complete 24 stories and 2 essays on science fiction, meeting twice weekly for 2 hours. They read and discuss in groups and complete portfolios. Some students prepare film scripts or write original science fiction stories. A course syllabus is appended. (Contains 15 references.) (SM)

This paper describes an online publishing site at Georgia Perimeter College called "The Story Project." The Web site contains more than 60 stories written by faculty members, students, administrators, staff, family, and friends, and serves to encourage student writing, create a community of writers, celebrate common and diverse past experiences, preserve the past, and encourage leisure reading. The stories range from school-related experiences to childhood adventures, travel stories to romantic recounts, sports stories, and immigration experiences. There are also military and civil rights categories, and the college hopes to expand and add more current history categories. Advantages of the Project include exposure to the past through real-life accounts and the educational opportunities inherent in having students publish their work. The College benefits from the stories by identifying potential subjects for articles in one of the College's publications, by celebrating the school's common and diverse experiences and heritage, through an opportunity to involve alumni and friends, and by bringing the College together for a unified goal and experience. The paper contains several excerpts from stories published in Georgia Perimeter College's "The Story Project." (CB)

Czech novels and short stories dealing with life in the 19th century were reviewed for information about how adults in rural areas of Czechoslovakia learned and the topics that interested them. The literature review confirmed that adults living in rural areas of Czechoslovakia in the 19th century generally had a great desire for education, including self-education, and faced many obstacles to gaining the knowledge they desired. Village schoolteachers and parsons played a crucial role. Schoolteachers not only disseminated books and periodicals but also strove to improve agriculture, gardening, and beekeeping. Enlightened parish priests of the time spread education among the common folk, often in cooperation with schoolteachers. The rural clergy loaned and distributed books to the common folk. Often, village schoolteachers and parsons continued their own education together. The story "The Village in the Foothills" provides a picture of lifelong learning in rural Czechoslovakia. The Czech literature also demonstrates that although some burghers and gentry actively fostered education of the common folk, some actively opposed it. Several novels and short stories document the existence of innovators among farmers, merchants, and others in rural Czechoslovakia. Numerous literary works describe the physical and other hardships faced by those undertaking educational work in rural Czechoslovakia. (Contains 23 references.) (MN)

Children are naturally drawn to award-winning books. Those who work with children know that the appeal of these books often comes from the shiny gold, silver, or bronze seals affixed to the covers of these special books. Teachers and librarians, however, need to be aware of the fact that the Newbery and Caldecott, and lesser known awards, are awards based on specific criteria that may or may not always meet the reading needs or appeal of every child. This paper answers the following questions: Why are award books important?; How are award books selected?; What have award books meant to the U.S. bookseller's market?; What trends are being seen in award-winning books?; What can teachers and librarians do individually and collaboratively to promote these award-winning books?; and Where can information on children's awards be located on the Web? The paper discusses the Newbery, Caldecott, Mildred L. Batchelder, and Pura Belpre Awards, as well as the Notable Children's Books, Children's Choices, and Teachers' Choices lists. It also discusses the Paul A. Witty Short Story Award and the Lee Bennet Hopkins Poetry Award. Contains an annotated list of recommended readings and resources. (NKA)

Part of a Ukrainian language development series, this intermediate-level reader provides a selection of short texts in modern Ukrainian, including poems, newspaper articles, short stories, fairy tales, fables, and dialogs for use by native speakers, heritage language, or second language learners of Ukrainian. (CNP)

Part of a Ukrainian language development series, this intermediate-level reader provides a selection of short texts in modern Ukrainian, including poems, newspaper articles, short stories, fairy tales, fables, and dialogs for use by native speakers, heritage language, or second language learners of Ukrainian. (CNP)

Part of a Ukrainian language development series, this intermediate-level reader provides a selection of short texts in modern Ukrainian, including poems, newspaper articles, short stories, fairy tales, fables, and dialogs for use by native speakers, heritage language, or second language learners of Ukrainian. (CNP)

Part of a Ukrainian language development series, this intermediate-level reader provides a selection of short texts in modern Ukrainian, including poems, newspaper articles, short stories, fairy tales, fables, and dialogs for use by native speakers, heritage language, or second language learners of Ukrainian. (CNP)

This document contains 58 poems, essays, letters, personal narratives, reminiscences, and short stories that were selected from 255 entries submitted by 170 adult student writers in Ohio. The student-authored literary works, which adult educators can use in their adult literacy classrooms, are grouped under the following themes: family, learning, nature, feelings, and reminiscences. Among the titles included are the following: "Raising Special Children" (Sharon Sheppard-Scott); "I Finally See" (Sharon Harsh); "The Bloodshed of Our Children" (Vickie Hargraves); "Brittany's Brace" (Norma J. King); "Daddies" (Cindy Wright); "My Success" (Tracy Graham); "To Mommy's Little Angel, Rebecca" (Amy Chandler); "An Evening Death" (Toni White); "A Single Mother's Reward" (Sharon Cavell); "Su Ah and Hyun Ah" (Kum Sun Kim); "Innocence Taken" (Regina Mulkey); "An Unsolved Fire" (Karen S. Smith); "A Tribute to the Step-Up Experience" (Karen Bowman); "Never Give Up" (Ruan Luong); "Safety at Home" (Kathy Brooks); "My Life's Dream" (Nora Thomas); "The Greatness in Yourself" (Stacy Jones); "Santa's Wife a Missing" (Karen Safewright); "Angle of the Lake" (Phil Edwards); "Maybe Tomorrow I'll Find What I'm After (A Man in Search of a Love)" (Lonnie Littleton); "My Old Kentucky Home" (Glen A. Baldwin); "Ramadan" (Traci Cornist); "Sharecropping" (Harold Lester); "Christmas in Ukraine" (Zenia Kovalska); "Hair Day" (Norma J. King); and "Wildmen" (Ken Tallon). Concluding the document are biographies of the authors and a list of honorable mention winners. (MN)

This study used journals and image notebooks to examine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students' cognitive skill development as they completed pleasure-reading activities that preceded creative writing tasks. Participants were freshmen at Taiwan's National Yang-Ming University who were enrolled in an English reading and writing course. Students completed a short story project in which they chose mystery novels, detective novels, or other novels to read for pleasure. This pleasure-reading activity was designed to facilitate their intrinsic motivation. To put the theory of the writing-reading connection into practice, the researcher observed and analyzed these student writers' journals, image notebooks, and final learning assessments, investigating their cognitive development in reading and writing. Results found that students were successfully empowered to create their own short stories by using the writing skills they learned both in and out of class from extensive reading of mystery or detective stories. (SM)

The outline for a reading course based on both intensive and extensive reading of short stories is presented. The 11-week course focuses on five stories, three selected by the teacher and two selected by the students as a class. A course overview details the sequence of reading and classroom activities, and the procedures for a typical four-week story unit are also specified. Each unit includes pre-reading activities, several options for text reading, a comprehension check, a discussion of literary issues (setting, character, plot), a session devoted to literature discussion circles, and extending activities such as role play, dialogue writing, debate, or discussion and special writing assignment. Additional materials include a sample exercise for one story, procedures for a literary circle, directions for student journal entry writing, notes on the evaluation of journals, procedures for keeping a vocabulary log, and directions for a concluding independent reading project. Contains 22 references and a list of potential stories for classroom use. (MSE)

The purpose of this study is to investigate how ten advanced Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language college students comprehend and interpret two English short stories--"The Discus Thrower" and "A Passage to India." Two types of data were gathered for this study: verbal self-reporting and post-reading responses. Oral interviews were used to analyze, interpret, generate themes, and to generally debrief the participants. Based on this analysis, four themes on reading emerged (sense-making, communication, reflexivity, and recontextualization) and are discussed in depth. Sense-making deals with how the participants made sense of the texts by searching for meaning flexibly and inflexibly. Communication deals with how they handled reading dissatisfaction and suspense. Reflexivity deals with situations where participants reflected upon themselves as in their roles as readers, thinkers, and learners. During recontextualization, participants changed their interpretations, previous understandings, and reading stances while they re-read the texts. Conclusions are fourfold: teachers should respect students' meaning-making of the texts and try not to impart their own interpretations; the reader response approach should include ungraded journals and free-writing as well as oral reflection; students should be encouraged to embrace difficulty, ambiguity, confusion, and divergence and not shun them; the level of reader flexibility is itself rather flexible, varying with the readers' orientations, assumptions, and beliefs from one text to the next. Two appendices containing the two English short stories, are included. (Contains 28 references.) (Author/KFT)

An outline of a "co-emergent" pedagogical perspective describes the conceptual framework for an advanced university-level English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) course. The course framework, which involves choosing and studying a brief science fiction story, allows for transcultural encounters via a transactional literary approach in which the various components of curriculum action exist in a dynamic and mutually specifying relationship. This paper describes the theoretical-methodological framework of the course, its objectives, the choice of the short short story, the syllabus, class management, and evaluation policy. (Contains 15 references.) (CNP)

A study investigated the effect of video and narrative presentations on children's comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. Participants were students in four heterogeneously grouped eighth-grade English classes (n=16, 22, 21, and 11) in a rural school district in southwestern New York. The short story selected was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League." It was chosen for its difficulty level--the text is at the instructional level of most of the students involved. Each class received a different mode of instruction: one class read the story to themselves; another class viewed a video rendition of the story; another class saw the same video but had captions included on the screen; the final class both read the text version to themselves during class and then viewed the video the following class period. A pretest (a matching test) and a posttest (the same matching test with answers in a different order, a series of multiple choice questions to measure comprehension and recall, and a short-answer evaluation question to measure critical thinking) were given. Significant findings are that students who read the text had greater vocabulary acquisition, while students who viewed the video showed a greater comprehension of the story. It appears that video watching has a positive effect on comprehension, and vocabulary acquisition seems to be positively affected when coupled with text. Closed captioning is a recent positive addition to teaching reading through television and video. (Contains two figures; 14 references; and sample pretest and posttests.) (NKA)

A teacher of English in a college-level intensive English language program describes a method for stimulating speech in high-intermediate and advanced students, using short stories. It is argued that in short stories, the themes are universal, and even shy students are willing to discuss this form of literature in class. Criteria for selecting stories are suggested: a theme that captures students' imagination; sufficient complexity to have varied interpretations; appeal for a cross-section of students; and rich vocabulary. The story should be written originally in English, and should range between two and twelve pages in length, depending on student experience. Reading the story is a homework assignment, and class discussion begins with a question about where the student's sympathies lie in the story and continues with clarification of any student misunderstandings of the plot. Discussion of cross-cultural topics and related social issues often ensues. Variation in narrative technique from story to story is recommended, and selection of some humorous stories among the serious is also encouraged. A list of stories addressing social issues, focusing on youth and age, using different writing styles, and including humor, with brief descriptions, is appended. (MSE)

A case study investigated an instructional model that incorporated the personal computer and Hyperstudio (tm) software into an assignment to write and illustrate an interactive, multimedia story. Subjects were 21 students in a fifth-grade homeroom in a public school (with a state-mandated minimum 45% ratio of minority students achieved by busing in students from surrounding areas) in an affluent area in the southeastern United States. Students were instructed in the writing of interactive stories using the process approach to writing and the software. Results indicated that: (1) students' writing improved in quantity and quality; (2) students were more motivated to complete the assignment; (3) the computer allowed for greater flexibility in writing due to its nature as a word processing tool; (4) even a single computer can be effectively used in conjunction with the language arts curriculum in the classroom; and (5) there were inherent difficulties associated with integrating computer technologies into classrooms--many students did not have experience with computers, even those who do have experience may lack keyboarding skills, and finding time to accomplish such a project requires outside help. Findings suggest that computers can be integrated into classrooms, and that computers can be used to enhance writing instruction and improve the quality of written work. (Contains 11 references and a table of data.) (RS)

A classroom method used to develop advanced English-as-a-second-language students' appreciation for a literary work, ability to do close text analysis, and general language skills is described. The four-session procedure uses a short story and careful sequence of teacher questioning. In the first session, students are prepared to understand the story's creative aspects by considering elements that make it meaningful. They then read the text. In the second session, small groups compare notes on their analyses and begin whole-class discussion of story specific elements: setting; characters; action; theme; style; language; cultural references; symbols. Specific questions are presented here. Student are given the full 90 minutes of the third session to write about what the theme of the story is and how the author uses characters and symbols to bring it out. In the fourth session, the essays are returned with teacher comments and error corrections. Common problems are discussed, and an exemplary essay written by a former student is distributed to all students. They are then asked to rewrite their essays and to make corrections to sentences with errors on a list distributed to them. Story text, exemplary essay, and sentences for correction are appended. (MSE)