Oral Narrative Genres as Dialogic Resources for Classroom Literature Study: A Contextualized Case Study of Conversational Narrative Discussion
Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the focal classroom? (c) What, if any, are the links between oral narrative and discussion? (d) If discussion and narrative co-occur, what sorts of oral narratives do narrators tell in discussions? and (e) If discussion and narrative co-occur, how can we characterize the overlap in terms of interaction? In the frequent conversational narrative discussions, where oral narrative and discussion discourse overlapped, teacher and students used various kinds of oral narrative genres to prime, sustain, ratify, and amplify discussion.
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the role of grammar in English language teaching. The present state of grammar teaching in China and the negative effects it causes upon EFL teaching have aroused great attention and consideration. In recent years fresh light has been cast on grammar learning and teaching with the appearance of electronic corpora and concordance. This paper gives a general introduction of concordance-based learning and discusses with examples how to apply it to grammar teaching. Accordingly, concordance-based learning may offer more effective and appropriate pedagogical implications. Index Terms—concordance, corpora linguistics, grammar teaching