Abstract of

Teaching Tips
Story Innovation: An Instructional Strategy for Developing Vocabulary and Fluency

Priscilla L. Griffith

Jiening Ruan

Story innovation is a form of scaffold writing in which the sentence and text patterns remain intact but the content is altered through the substitution of vocabulary to change the setting, characters, or action in a story. Story innovation is presented as a way to develop vocabulary knowledge through deep processing and to provide fluency practice. Teachers will also find story innovation useful for working with struggling readers or students learning English as a second language. It is a way to foster a nonthreatening, low-anxiety, and highly supportive learning environment. The authors describe the scenario in one classroom in which the students wrote a story innovation, and they provide a step-by-step process teachers can follow when implementing story innovation in the classroom.

Abstract from Griffith, P.L., & Ruan, J. (2007, December). Story Innovation: An Instructional Strategy for Developing Vocabulary and Fluency. The Reading Teacher, 61(4), 334–338. doi: 10.1598/RT.61.4.6

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