Although many studies have been done on the benefits of parent/teacher-child interactions during shared storybook reading or read'aloud sessions, very few have examined the potential of professional storytellers' oral discourse to support children's vocabulary learning. In those storytelling sessions conducted by professional storytellers, the process of telling a story is typically not accompanied by a book, but only by the teller's well'coordinated gestures, facial expressions and voice modulations. In this study, I perform a multimodal analysis of storytellers' oral discourse recorded during two storytelling sessions for four-to-five-year-old children. The study aims to (1) find out the specific types of vocal and visual features accompanying the spoken words which were unlikely to be known by the children but used by the storytellers for representations of events and characters, and (2) explore the potential of these multimodal features in oral storytelling to support children's inferring of word meanings. The study offers insights into multimodality in oral storytelling and implications for exploring the potential of multimodal features in this form of literacy practice to support children's vocabulary learning.

This is a review of a book containing a Narrative Analysis of the plots of 27 Burmese folk tales in English translation. As applied here, Narrative Analysis is an insightful set of research methodologies to discover regular features of plot structures; however, it does not include the aspects of Textual Analysis that dig deeply into the structures and features of the original language. In this book, no actual features of the Burmese language are discussed. Both Narrative Analysis and Textual Analysis fall into the same broad set of methodologies and inquiries that are covered by the term Discourse Analysis. This book is valuable in understanding and guiding analysis of narratives following in the tradition of Vladimir Propp and his study of the morphology of Russian fairy tales. The book proposes a clear, imitable method that allows comparison of folk tale structure using form, function and field. It also suggests ways that Narrative Analysts and Folklorists can examine cultural influences reflected in the folktales.

Drawing on concepts from narratology and stylistics, this article examines narrativity and creativity in an interactive oral storytelling context where the teller engages the audience directly in the storytelling process by calling for their outward responses and then incorporating these responses into her representations of events and characters. I analyse one storytelling performance of a contemporary professional storyteller as an example of interactive storytelling and discuss how she established narrativity and displayed creativity in the process of co-constructing an oral story with an adult audience. Challenges an oral storyteller may face in this process are also discussed.

Lesson transitions are important units for analysis not only for establishing the presence of group/pair work but also for examining the contextual conditions for small-group learning. Scholars have suggested that the 'open' or 'closed' contextual conditions set up through the teacher's use of language to introduce group/pair work influence the quality of pupil's talk and interthinking, i.e. the use of language for thinking together and collectively solving problems. The nature of transition, however, has not been fully characterised in the research literature for us to understand what these conditions are.In this paper, we present the findings from an analysis of teachers' discourse when the teachers introduced their pupils to group/pair work in two primary English classrooms in Singapore. Our analysis shows the extended and recursive nature of lesson transitions in these classrooms, as well as how the two teachers orchestrated conditions of entry into group/pair work and how the pupils were (un)successfully inducted into such tasks. These preliminary findings about transitions can have pedagogical implications for the ways teachers can create conditions that will support learning when they introduce group/pair work to their pupils.