Personal narratives make up more than half of children’s conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children’s ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers’ views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children’s personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.

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Purpose: This article reviews the literature on students' developing skills in summarizing expository texts and describes strategies for evaluating students' expository summaries. Evaluation outcomes are presented for a professional development project aimed at helping teachers develop new techniques for teaching summarization. Methods: Strategies for evaluating expository summaries were applied in a professional development project in which teachers learned to teach fourth-and fifth-grade students to identify the macrostructures of short expository texts. Outcomes were measured by comparing results for students in experimental classrooms whose teachers received instruction in text macrostructure with results for students in control classrooms. Results: Students in the treatment condition produced significantly higher microstructure and macrostructure scores than students in the control group. Differences were greater between treatment and control groups than between fourth-and fifth-grade groups. Conclusions: This study provided preliminary evidence that treatment involving identification of expository text structures and use of graphic organizers to highlight the organization promoted greater growth in summarization skills than age-related development for fourth-and fifth-grade students.

Current philosophy in early childhood education advocates family-centered intervention goals for handicapped children. To develop appropriate gaals for children from diverse cultures, professionals must understand parents' beliefs and values regarding the family's and child's resources and needs; and they must adopt an ecological framework that considers children's functioning within the broader aspects of their environment. Interviewing provides a means of obtaining the information necessary to develop culturally appropriate, family-centered intervention goals. This paper describes the influence of culture on the interview process and describes an approach to ethnographic interviewing of families of handicapped children that enables professionals to ask the right questions to the right people in the right ways so they can assist families in meeting the needs of their children.