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\"Part history, part memoir, this book chronicles an overlooked aspect of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, with a focus on the war victims and refugees most tragically affected by the carnage. The author recounts his two years \"in-country\" as an aid worker and describes how the humanitarian effort was conducted and why it failed\"-- Provided by publisher.

To investigate the narrative development of Chinese-speaking children aged 3–6 years, 80 children were prompted to tell personal stories. High point analysis was used and both narrative components and overall narrative patterns were analyzed. In terms of narrative components, Chinese children were more skillful in using complicating action, orientation and evaluation than they were in resolution, direct and reported speech. With age, their narratives were longer and richer in content. No gender differences were found in any of the seven narrative components. For narrative patterns, the most frequent was the two-event pattern at age 3 and the chronological pattern from age 4 to age 6. However, the chronological pattern at age 5 and 6 differed from the chronological pattern at age 4. The proportion of leap-frog, two-event and one-event patterns decreased with age, but most Chinese children at age 6 have yet to develop the ability to tell a classic narrative that includes resolution. These findings provided evidence for a developmental pattern of the narrative development in preschool Chinese children and suggested more attention should be paid to improve children’s ability to resolve a story, telling listeners how everything worked out in the end.

\"Former Navy SEAL Senior Chief James Hatch tells a ... tale of being badly wounded on a special ops mission that ended his two-decades-long military career; his searing recovery; and the struggle to live life off the speeding train of war\"-- Provided by publisher.

This paper argues the need for new conceptualisations of the relationship between water and development to better reflect the reality of cities in the Global South. Using a case study of Jakarta, Indonesia, it traces how the development narrative for urban water supply contributed to the understanding of informality as a binary opposite of the urban infrastructural ideal (undeveloped, temporary, transitional). The paper explores the implications of this framing as they emerged through the outcomes of the largest international development intervention in Jakartaʼs water supply in the 1990s, which culminated in the current private-sector concession contracts. The case illustrates how informality in Jakartaʼs water supply should be understood not as a failure of the state, technology, or development to achieve the urban infrastructural ideal, but rather as a particular mode of urbanisation that was reliant on, and productive of, a range of informal practices. Given the current heterogeneity in water supply strategies in many cities of the Global South, we need to accept the so-called informal as an enduringly dominant, rather than a remnant, mode of supply, and attend to ways in which the codification of informal practices reveal a more nuanced politics of access that reflect complex realities of southern urban waterscapes.

Speakers produce both referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, and non-referential gestures, which lack semantic content. While a large number of studies have demonstrated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of referential gestures as well as their precursor and predictive role in both typically developing (TD) and non-TD children, less is known about non-referential gestures in cognitive and complex linguistic domains, such as narrative development. This paper is a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the research concerned with assessing the effects of non-referential gestures in such domains. A search of the literature turned up 11 studies, collectively involving 898 2- to 8-year-old TD children. Although they yielded contradictory evidence, pointing to the need for further investigations, the results of the six studies–in which experimental tasks and materials were pragmatically based–revealed that non-referential gestures not only enhance information recall and narrative comprehension but also act as predictors and causal mechanisms for narrative performance. This suggests that their bootstrapping role in language development is due to the fact that they have important discourse–pragmatic functions that help frame discourse. These findings should be of particular interest to teachers and future studies could extend their impact to non-TD children.

Children achieve increasingly complex language milestones initially in gesture or in gesture+speech combinations before they do so in speech, from first words to first sentences. In this study, we ask whether gesture continues to be part of the language-learning process as children begin to develop more complex language skills, namely narratives. A key aspect of narrative development is tracking story referents, specifying who did what to whom. Adults track referents primarily in speech by introducing a story character with a noun phrase and then following the same referent with a pronoun—a strategy that presents challenges for young children. We ask whether young children can track story referents initially in communications that combine gesture and speech by using character viewpoint in gesture to introduce new story characters, before they are able to do so exclusively in speech using nouns followed by pronouns. Our analysis of 4- to 6-year-old children showed that children introduced new characters in gesture+speech combinations with character viewpoint gestures at an earlier age than conveying the same referents exclusively in speech with the use of nominal phrases followed by pronouns. Results show that children rely on viewpoint in gesture to convey who did what to whom as they take their first steps into narratives.

The article deals with the validation of the internationalization imperative in higher education institutions (HEIs) of the Nordic countries. I focus on both the goals and motives behind activities supporting internationalization, but also on the manner of their habitualization and institutionalization in the practice of academic administration and organizational management. The issue of legitimization of institutional changes is addressed by means of the rationalized myths that create durable dispositions for specific practices, changes in procedures and attitudes in a given socio-political setting. I draw on empirical examples that include practical solutions and strategies developed under the conditions of semiperipheral positionality of the Nordic states. This perspective makes their internationalization policies an interesting frame of reference for other countries and the paper concludes by pointing to the latest trends that can serve either as an inspiration or a warning for other states. The Nordic countries offer an example of how institutionalizing the 'strategic gains' narrative from globalization may lead to a recalibration of an earlier knowledge regime along with attempts to change centre-periphery relations, including the reframing of priorities and rationalities of different stakeholders in higher education.

In this study 538 children composed 1 oral and 1 written fictional story in both 2nd and 4th grades. Each child represented 1 of 4 diagnostic groups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), or low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). The stories of the TL group had more different words, more grammatical complexity, fewer errors, and more overall quality than either language-impaired group at either grade. Stories of the SLI and LNIQ groups were consistently stronger than were those of the NLI group. Kindergarten children with language impairment (LI) whose standardized test performance suggested normalization by 2nd grade also appeared to have recovered in storytelling abilities at that point. By 4th grade, however, these children's stories were less like the children with TL and more like those of children with persistent LI than they had been in 2nd grade. Oral stories were better than written stories in both grades, although the greatest gains from 2nd to 4th grade were generally made on written stories. Girls told stronger stories than did boys at both grades, regardless of group placement. It is concluded that story composition tasks are educationally relevant and should play a significant role in the evaluation of children with developmental LI.

This study investigates how short-term naturalistic immersion shapes the development of evaluative narrative competence in Japanese junior high school students learning English as a foreign language. While prior second language acquisition (SLA) research has established the benefits of input-rich environments, little is known about how implicit learning during brief immersion experiences supports higher-order storytelling skills. To address this gap, we analyzed students’ performance on a standardized problem-solving task and a storytelling task before and after a one-month homestay abroad. Results showed significant post-immersion gains in narrative complexity, with longer stories, greater use of causal and evaluative devices, and increased diversity of expression. Regression analysis revealed that the age of first English exposure strongly predicted outcomes: early starters demonstrated broader and more sophisticated use of evaluative strategies than later starters. These findings suggest that short-term immersion can substantially enhance narrative competence, particularly for learners with early exposure, while highlighting the need for tailored pedagogical interventions to help later starters capitalize on implicit learning opportunities.

Joan N. Kaderavek University of Toledo, Toledo, OH Teresa A. Ukrainetz University of Wyoming, Laramie Sarita L. Eisenberg Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ Ronald B. Gillam University of Texas at Austin Contact author: Laura Justice, Preschool Language & Literacy Lab, Curry School of Education, Box 400873, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4273. Email: ljustice{at}virginia.edu PURPOSE: This research was conducted to develop a clinical tool—the Index of Narrative Microstructure (INMIS)—that would parsimoniously account for important microstructural aspects of narrative production for school-age children. The study provides field test age- and grade-based INMIS values to aid clinicians in making normative judgments about microstructural aspects of pupils' narrative performance. METHOD: Narrative samples using a single-picture elicitation context were collected from 250 children age 5–12 years and then transcribed and segmented into T-units. A T-unit consists of a single main clause and any dependent constituents. The narrative transcripts were then coded and analyzed to document a comprehensive set of microstructural indices. RESULTS: Factor analysis indicated that narrative microstructure consisted of 2 moderately related factors. The Productivity factor primarily comprised measures of word output, lexical diversity, and T-unit output. The Complexity factor comprised measures of syntactic organization, with mean length of T-units in words and proportion of complex T-units loading most strongly. Principal components analysis was used to provide a linear combination of 8 variables to approximate the 2 factors. Formulas for calculating a student's performance on the 2 factors using 8 narrative measures are provided. CONCLUSIONS: This study provided a method for professionals to calculate INMIS scores for narrative Productivity and Complexity for comparison against field test data for age (5- to 12-year-old) or grade (kindergarten to Grade 6) groupings. INMIS scores complement other tools in evaluating a child's narrative performance specifically and language abilities more generally. Key Words: narrative development, narrative assessment, language assessment, school-age language CiteULike     Connotea     Del.icio.us     Digg     Facebook     Reddit     Technorati     Twitter     What's this?