What Are Story Grammars?
Just as a grammar is a way of describing language, so a story grammar is a way of describing a story. All languages have syntax, morphology and phonology, just as stories have settings, themes, plots and resolutions. Story grammars are tools that can be used to increase students skills in listening to and retelling stories. The description below includes the most important components of the three-session workshop attended by the teachers. Since the process that they went through to discover story grammars was a crucial precursor to their acceptance of the grammars as a useful teaching tool, the reader is asked to follow their search in these pages. Benefits Shown in Recent Research Research has shown that the structure of expository and narrative texts can facilitate first and second language readers recall of events (Carrell 1984, Mandler and Johnson 1977, Meyer 1975, Ross 1986, Thorndyke 1977). Riggenbach (1990) states that discourse analysis techniques can provide opportunities for
