Educational publishers often make their expository texts more vivid, by making them emotionally interesting, concrete and imagery-provoking, and proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way. Previous studies have found mixed results regarding the effects of vividness on the attractiveness, comprehensibility, and memorability of educational texts. In order to be able to account for these mixed results, we chart and describe the various ways in which educational texts can be made more vivid. Drawing from the literature on narrativity, we define prototypical narrative elements in the educational domain (i.e., particularized events, experiencing character, landscape of consciousness), and demonstrate that Dutch Social Studies and Science texts apply these elements in varying combinations. Subsequently, we illustrate how texts can be given a voice by imitating a direct, “here and now” author-student interaction.

This study aims to gain more insight into narrativity in the educational domain. Based on earlier research, we define three prototypical narrative elements (i.e., the presence of particularized events, an experiencing character, and a landscape of consciousness), and present an analytic model that illustrates how varying combinations of these elements occur in Dutch educational materials for Social Studies and Science. Using this model, we then analyze experimental texts from previous studies on the effects of narrativity on text comprehension and recall. We demonstrate that experimental narrative texts nearly always exhibit all prototypical narrative elements, while their expository counterparts also contain some narrative elements and thus are not purely expository. In addition, we show that no consistent patterns can be found in the results of the selected experimental studies, and that the data at hand therefore do not allow for strong conclusions about the effects of narrativity in educational texts. Finally, we discuss the limitations of previous as well as the present research and the implications for future research.

While the use of narrative elements in educational texts seems to be an adequate means to enhance students’ engagement and comprehension, we know little about how and to what extent these elements are used in the present-day educational practice. In this quantitative corpus-based analysis, we chart how and when narrative elements are used in current Dutch educational texts (N=999). While educational texts have traditionally been considered prime exemplars of expository texts, we show that the distinction between the expository and narrative genre is not that strict in the educational domain: prototypical narrative elements – particularized events, experiencing characters, and landscapes of consciousness – occur in 45% of the corpus’ texts. Their distribution varies between school subjects: while specific events, specific people, and their experiences are often at the heart of the to-be-learned information in history texts, narrativity is less present in the educational content of biology and geography texts. Instead publishers employ narrative-like strategies to make these texts more concrete and imaginable, such as the addition of fictitious characters and representative entities.

Voice elements are those elements of educational texts that authors use to interact with students, such as questions, evaluations, or direct address forms (“you”). These elements are intended to enhance students’ engagement and comprehension, but we know little about the extent to which they are used in present-day educational texts. Using a corpus of Dutch biology, geography, and history texts for grade 5 and grade 8 (N=1055), this study shows that voice elements are barely differentiated over grade levels. Conversely, voice elements are generally diversified over school subjects, as they are less frequent in history texts, which convey readily imaginable and relatable content, compared to biology and geography texts, which discuss less relatable content for which students need to exert more effort to connect it to their own world. This finding suggests that authors of educational texts have intuitions about the conditions under which voice elements are a desirable attribute.