Performance
Noyce and Christie (1989) point out that lack of story sense undoubtedly inhibits
the students’ abilities to write their own stories. Moreover, students’ writing lacking
coherent information may be randomly stated and have key parts missing. Therefore,
it is suggested that students be given an organized way of getting started when
confronted with writing tasks. According to Ruddell (2004), mapping is an
organizational activity. It therefore precedes writing naturally by providing visual
representation of students’ constructions and organizations of knowledge. While
writing from maps, students can focus on one or more aspects of this organized
scheme and then elaborate their knowledge construction with written text. Mapping is
the primary vehicle for organizing, selecting, and connection information. With the
assistance of story mapping, students are able write well-formed, well-organized, and
rich-content stories. Students who need help with organizing ideas for fiction stories
can be encouraged to take a few minutes to write down their thoughts on a story map
before writing. This map becomes the framework that guides the writer in keeping
their stories going.
There are three issues involved in the story-mapping strategy to writing. The first
issue is: Can the story-mapping strategy promote students’ writing ability? According
to Brown (1988), the story organizer, one of the three pre-writing strategies in the
study, has best effects on the quality of L1 students’ narrative writing. The participants
in this study, including twenty-four 4th-grade L1 students, received different types of
prewriting activities, with Experimental Group 1 using the story organizer activity,
Experimental Group 2 receiving the webbing activity, and the Control Group
receiving the brainstorming activity. The three prewriting activities had different
focuses. The story organizer was a prewriting activity designed with questions about
story elements to guide the writing of narrative stories, including the setting, initiating
event, internal response, attempt, consequence, and reaction; while the webbing
activity used a visual clustering of ideas that related to the topic and the brainstorming
activity encouraged students to list any ideas that came to their minds relating to the
topic. The participants were given 15 minutes to plan and 30 minutes to write their
narratives. Although the results showed that Control Group scored higher than
Experimental Group 1 and Experimental Group 2, Experimental Group 1 undergoing
the story organizer scored significantly better than Experimental Group Two and
Control Group when the primary story elements were analyzed. In this study, the story
organizer was the best prewriting activity that helped narrative writing. Also,
Fitzgerald and Teasley (1986) find that when 4th-grade L1 students receiving
instruction on narrative structure, the overall quality and the organization of their
writing was improved. The participants (N=20) were divided into a control group and
an experimental group. The former received instruction on narrative story structure.
The latter received instruction on dictionary skills and word usage. The results
demonstrated that direct instruction of narrative structure did facilitate the
organization of children’s writing. In Taiwan, Hsu (2001), who investigated the direct
instruction of story mapping on Chinese writing proficiency, reported that the 61 6th
graders performed significantly better in writing fluency after the story mapping
instruction. The experimental group outperformed the control group in the “total
score”, “content”, and “organization” of writing performance.
The second issue is: Do the students’ work contain more story elements after the
story mapping instruction? Vallecorsa & deBettencourt (1997) reported the positive
effects of direct transfer reading training on story writing performance. The three
7th-grade L1 students with learning disabilities were taught to use a story map that
identified elements of the story form as an aid to story recall and story writing
performance. The scale identified eight important story elements developed by
MacArthur and Graham: main characters, locale, time, starter event, goals, ending,
and characters’ reaction. The results showed that the story mapping strategy was an
effective way to help students develop the knowledge of story structure and in turn,
improve their reading and writing performance. Harris & Graham (1992) dealt with
the two issues discussed above. They collected the research results by observing
Danoff’s writing class for one year. They reported positive effects of story mapping
on learners’ writing performance by analyzing the stories written in the pretest and
posttest. Danoff worked with a group of fifth grade L1 students, including both
normally achieving students and several students with learning disabilities with
writing, with a class period a day devoted to the story writing approach. The results
showed that all students made improvement in story writing by including greater
detail and elaboration as well as more “goals” and “actions.” Harris & Graham
indicated that the students had shown improvement in the number of story elements
included in their stories. Although a few of the students were already using all the
story elements in the beginning of the instruction, they showed improvement in
detail and action in their stories as well as improvement in their quality of their
writing after receiving the instruction. Additionally, although some students still
experienced anxiety about composing and writing difficulties, most students reported
they enjoy writing and were comfortable with it after receiving the story mapping
strategy. According to Saddler, Moran, Graham and Harris (2004), the 6 African
American second-graders composed longer stories with more story elements and
richer story content after the prewriting planning instruction of story elements. Similar
improvement in personal narratives also occurred for all students but one.
The third issue is: Do students make progress in each story elements? In Fine’s
(1991) research, the participants included 77 L1 2nd graders. The teacher provided
direct instruction of story grammar, inclusive of characters, setting, and plot, in the
experimental group. The results of ANOVAs on the means for the posttest story
grammar scores, total adapted-Glazer Narrative Composition Scale scores and holistic
scale scores showed significant improvement in writing achievement of the
experimental group over the control group. Qualitative analysis showed that students
had a good understanding of the concept of character at the pretest and posttest
interview. Eight students who could not manipulate “plot” before the instruction could
do so after direct instruction in story grammar. Five students who could not identify or
manipulate “setting” could do so after direct instruction in story grammar. Moreover,
the students in the experimental group also reported that they would think of
characters, setting, and plot before writing a story after receiving knowledge of story
grammar as a strategy.
Given the studies reviewed above, it has been shown that story mapping
instruction benefits L1 story writing a lot. It is a pity that few of the studies discuss
the correlation among the three issues and investigate which story elements are
difficult for students to manipulate. Besides, many of the studies focused on the L1
students with learning disabilities instead of average students. To the best of our
knowledge, no research here in Taiwan has been conducted to investigate the effects
of the story-mapping instruction on the EFL average students. Therefore, the present
study aims to investigate the effects of story mapping instruction on students’ story
structure, writing performance and explore which story elements are challenging to
the students.
2.4 Summary
Through the review of the literature on prewriting strategies and story mapping,
it is found that the prewriting strategy, story mapping, can help beginning writers with
their writing performance. The prewriting activities play a crucial role in the writing
process. They involve organizing, generating, and goal setting. It is within this
component that many teachers provide activities to help students get started, and to
organize and generate their thoughts. It has been proposed that story mapping is
helpful as a prewriting activity to facilitate the generation of students’ narrative
writing since this strategy provides language learners the graphically representation of
the story structure.