Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Action! suspense! culture! insight! : reading stories in the classroom

Running title: Reading stories in the classroomAt head of title: Center for the Study of Reading.Bibliography: leaves 32-39Supported in part by the National Institute of Education under contract no. US-HEW-C-400-81-003

The acquisition of spanish perfective aspect : A study on children's production and comprehension

This paper presents the acquisition of Spanish perfective aspect in production and comprehension. It argues that, although young children use perfective aspect to talk about completed events, young children have difficulty in assessing perfective meaning from perfective morphology. This paper proposes that in the process of acquiring aspectual meaning, children use local strategies to decode aspectual meaning from form: when analyzing a completed situation, young children depend on certain learnability factors to correctly assess the entailment of completion of the perfective, namely, their ability to determine if the object of the event measures out the event as a whole or not, and their ability to read the agent’s intentions. When those factors are removed from the situation, young children had difficulty determining the entailment of completion of perfective aspect. This study also suggests that the manner in which aspectual information is conveyed in a language, may play a role on the readiness of the acquisition of the semantic morphology of the language (e.g., verb+object vs. verb+affixes). The results of this study indicate that successful performance on the semantics of Spanish perfective aspect develops around the age of 5-6

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE OF BALINESE MOTHER TONGUE THROUGH THE TRADITIONAL STORY TELLING (

Maintaining language in particular mother tongue in a community is cumpulsory because it shows identity and attitude of appreciation toward the ancestors’ inheritance. This research is a descriptive qualitative research which aims at investigating the language maintenance of Balinese mother tongue. The research aims to find out whether the habit of telling story (mesatua)(mesatua)is still done in Batu Bulan Village of Gianyar Regency. This research applies Hoffman’s framework; interview and questionnaires were used as the technique in collecting the data. It can be found that the habit of storytelling (mesatua) is rarely done due to the development of modern world and technology. There is a tendency of language shift by parents in conducting storytelling to their children; shifting from mother tongue to national language. The activities were usually done orally by the parents or grandparents. There are many story told to the children and major stories told were I Lutung jak I Kakua, Siap Selem serta I Bawang jak I Kasun

Systemic Strategies to Improve the Readability of the English Version of Indonesian Children Stories

The paper discusses languge exploitation for the children story books and offers several systemic strategies to improve the quality of language exploitation so that the books have a better quality for their readabality. Thirty children story books which are classified as narratives according to the publishers were randomly selected for the analysis. The books are targeted for children from five to twelve years old. The analysis on the text structure shows that all the stories have the three obligatory discourse units, namely orientation, complication, and resolution. Meanwhile, seen from the lexicogrammatical exploitation, most of the books have various grammatical mistakes and difficult words

ENCOURAGING CHILDREN IN LEARNING ENGLISH COMMUNICATIVELY BY USING SOME FUN ACTIVITIES IN THE CLASSROOM

This paper is talking about the interesting and fun way in teaching children as the young learner in English. It refers to an approach that is called the functional approach that focusesin the method of communicative language teaching. In this method children are not onlytaught English structurally, but also the communicative aspect of learning English for secondlanguage. By using this method it is really hoped that the children will not only learningEnglish and practicing in the classroom. Later, the children are asked to practice theirEnglish in real life situation, therefore, the material and the atmosphere of teaching andlearning English must be fun and bring the children as if they face it in the real life. So, theEnglish teacher must give some task and activities that support this method, it can be in theform of games, role play, projects, and telling stories