This study explores the relationship between Black English skills acquired outside school and figurative language comprehension in standard English. Path analysis confirmed the direct influence of "sounding" skill (a Black language ability) on figurative language, comprehension for Black youth. Only general verbal ability affected White…

Describes some of the strategies of repetition and metaphor used by Black American novelist Richard Wright, as a model that students can adopt in their own writing, both for generating ideas and for revising them. Appendixes include various drafts of an interview statement by Wright. (HTH)

Examines the relations among general language competency factors such as word knowledge, comprehension, and paradigmatic/syntagmatic reasoning, and college developmental readers' ability to interpret two text formats designed to elicit either a literal or figurative interpretation. (DF)

Examined cultural and instructional influences on comprehension of figurative language ("sounding") by elementary school children in Harlem and studied effects of a program of creative writing instruction provided by visiting writers. Concludes that special instruction tended to improve figurative language comprehension of children and…

We noticed that when workers try to explain their mathematical practices to inquisitive outsiders, breakdowns in communication arise. We present here an example in which a worker spontaneously uses metaphors and models to facilitate explanation and communication. We analyse these, drawing on Lakoff & Johnson (1999) and Lakoff & Nunez…

The paper considers a teaching experiment carried out with secondary school students (9th grade), who face modelling tasks to approach some basic concepts of algebra and early calculus. The focus is on an embodied analysis of students' cognitive processes. The analysis highlights the use of metaphors as a means of sharing knowledge. (Contains 2…

The intention of this study was to discover how and to what extent children use simile and metaphor in their spontaneous oral language. Results showed that type of stimulus was the most influential factor in inducing children's oral metaphoric language, with the nature of the task also significant. (Author/GK)

Discusses classroom literary practices related to teacher questioning, retelling, literalism, and figurative language for children in the concrete operational stage; concludes that recent research on response to literature may say as much about what children are taught to do as what they do developmentally. Offers suggestions about teaching…

Reports on a study designed to: (1) produce a multiple-choice test which would measure children's comprehension of figurative language, and (2) obtain information about the development of figurative language comprehension in children. (Author/AM)

In this article, the author, an Associate Professor of Education at West Virginia State University, describes teaching classes of first-generation college students whose cultural stories provide rich frames of reference as they explore and process the material of the teacher education program. In the final exam each semester, she asks the students…

Fourth-grade students who participated in a yearlong, whole-class teaching experiment not only reconceptualized natural numbers but also generated flexible solution strategies to perform numerical computations mentally and in writing. Students' reconceptualization of number was mediated by their perceived resemblance between the physical action of…

This paper intents to analyze the influence of John Dewey's ideas in the movement that defended the educational renovation in Brazil (named New School) at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s. For this, it explains two trends of that movement: the first is described by the metaphor of industrial or mechanical efficiency, whose emphasis was in the…

This paper is a collage of voices and ideas that attempts to move us away from an understanding of philosophy as argument and counterargument toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. (Contains 4 notes.)