Ryan Spencer, University of Canberra
As parents know all too well, children love to re-read their favourite books over and over again.
While this may feel painfully repetitive to adults, there is something in the text that is bringing children back time after time.
Children benefit greatly from re-reading as they learn the rhyming or predictable pattern of the text – rather than spending that time trying to understand what the book’s about.
Research shows that repeated reading of favourite books can boost vocabulary by up to 40%.
But this is only truly beneficial when the text is read aloud.
Research shows that when preschool children are frequently read to, their brain areas supporting comprehension and mental imagery are highly engaged. Studies show that this helps with the development of reading skills, such as word recognition, when they start to learn to read.
By assisting our children to develop these skills, we’re ensuring that they know that text conveys a message, and to read on for more information when they get stuck on a word.
And it’s never too early to start reading aloud to your children. Australian author and literacy studies professor Mem Fox says reading to children from birth can help develop a love for and understanding of books.
Need more convincing? Here are five ways that reading aloud can benefit your child:
Fluency when reading is essential in order to build strong and confident readers. But it can frequently be misinterpreted as relating only to reading speed alone.
Researcher Timothy Rasinski highlights the “bridge” that fluency plays in between word recognition and understanding what the book is about. He highlights the way that reading fluently at a natural reading speed helps to ensure that comprehension is maintained when reading.
When you share a book with your child, they get to see good reading modelled for them. They establish a sense of the speed and prosody that is essential to fluent reading. This then aids in their comprehension of the story.
To help your child hear themselves as a fluent reader, choose a favourite book, and take it in turns reading a sentence, such as in the style of echo reading, where you might read a sentence or a page first then your child repeats the same part.
Hearing themselves as confident and fluent readers allows children to break out of the struggling reader mindset where every book is a challenge.
Research shows that possessing a broad vocabulary is essential to making sure that children have access to a range of different words with different meanings.
It makes sense that the more words that children know when reading independently, the more they’ll enjoy what they’re reading.
While vocabulary lessons are taught in schools, parents can also assist in helping their children learn new words at home by reading favourite books aloud.
Before reading a book for the first time, flick through the pages with your child. Look for any interesting words that your child might not have seen before. Talk about what these words mean and where they may have seen them before.
Successful reading is all about making sense of what we’re reading.
As adults, if we don’t quite understand something that we’ve just read, the first thing that we tend to do is to go back and reread.
This is a vital skill that we need to encourage in our children to help them become self sufficient readers.
Reading aloud provides the means by which to clearly take about what is happening in the book and to practice this rereading skill.
The conversations about what the book is about can take place before reading with your child in order to predict what might happen. Discussions during and after reading are also usual in clarifying what your children have just read.
Fathers and other significant males in a child’s life play a vital role in encouraging their children to be active readers at home.
While mothers do tend to spend more time with their children and often take on reading as a part of this experience, research demonstrates clear benefits when dads, uncles, grandfathers and male friends read with children.
Dads are often seen as the untapped resource when it comes to reading with their children and they frequently provide a different range of experiences, especially when reading aloud.
This might be through using different funny voices and even the content that is read together.
As any avid reader knows there are few things better in life than curling up with a favourite book and not wanting to put it down.
Sharing this experience with your child is a valuable way to get them on the path to loving books as well.
Consider taking home a new book from the bookstore or library and selling this to your child.
Try talking about the pictures, look at interesting words and predict what might happen before reading together.
When you are reading the book aloud for the first time, use different voices for each character.
If you’re looking for some inspiration on what to read to your child, then try the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards shortlist, or the Dymock’s Top 51 Kids list which is voted for by kids for kids.
Ryan Spencer, Clinical Teaching Specialist; Lecturer in Literacy Education, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Yvonne Griggs, University of New England
Let’s deal with the timeworn adage that has haunted screen adaptation studies since the birth of the moving image. Can any screen version be as good as the book?
Is the new ABC miniseries The Beautiful Lie, the latest screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), as good as the book?
In short, the answer is yes. But the question, I would argue – and it’s one that film and TV critics in particular pose with tiresome regularity – is redundant. Why? Because, as with The Beautiful Lie, screen adaptations of the novel take us into very different creative territory.
Television adaptations of canonical texts invariably take the costume drama route, presenting us with safe, predictable genre fare that’s usually rolled out on Sunday evenings in serialized drip-feed.
From the BBC serializations in 1961 (starring a pre-Bond Sean Connery) and 1977, to the 1985 TV movie and the Masterpiece Theatre miniseries adaptation in 2000, Tolstoy’s tale of doomed obsessive love plays out in all of its predictable period glory, accompanied by the prerequisite dose of reverence for the canon.
But The Beautiful Lie is anything but predictable.
Given a contemporary makeover by writers Alice Bell and Jonathan Gavin, this Anna (played by Sarah Snook) and her husband, Alexander (Rodger Corser), are sporting “nobility”.
ABC TV Publicity.
Their status as modern day tennis celebrities ensures their transition from Tolstoy’s 19th century Russia to 21st century Australia within a familiar context, while Vronsky’s military potency is translated to that of indie record producer, Skeet (Benedict Samuel), the sexy outsider whose star momentarily enters the gullible Kitty’s orbit. It is difficult to see how this seemingly radical recalibration of Tolstoy’s narrative can possibly work. And yet, it does.
The Bell/Gavin script has a particularly Australian flavor to it and earlier television dramas they’ve penned clearly influence their treatment of Tolstoy’s story. Rather than replicating 19th century Russia, Bell and Gavin create a contemporaneous Australian family drama of compelling energy for their 21st century audience.
The heady story of love and obsession is of relevance to all times but what’s achieved in this adaptation is a similarly telling critique of a society at a specific moment in time. Layers of family drama unfold, exposing the same levels of dysfunctionality, the same preoccupation with matters of infidelity.
Bell’s award winning work on two earlier TV drama adaptations Puberty Blues (2012), The Slap (2011) feeds into her depiction of sexual exploration and familial disputes. Gavin, a co-writer on Puberty Blues, is also an award-winning writer of relationship dramas including Offspring (2010).
All play out against a decidedly Australian cultural and geographical backdrop. But what’s handled with aplomb in this modern take on Anna Karenina is the humour that is so often left out of adaptations of Russian realist literature. The marital strife of Anna’s brother Kingsley and his wife Dolly is infused with gentle comedy, and Kitty’s adolescent angst strikes a familiar chord.
The success or failure of screen romance rests with the chemistry of its lovers: casting is as important to screen narratives as the prose on the page is to the writer.
In The Beautiful Lie, Sarah Snook and her Vronsky, Benedict Samuel, convince us of the inevitability of their union. But the series takes us one step closer to the heat of the affair in a most unusual reversal of narrative “voice”.
ABC TV Publicity.
To adapt a first person narration from prose to screen is traditionally viewed as problematic: how does the visual storyteller translate first person narration through the apparatus of an all-seeing camera lens? Voiceover is employed sparingly on screen if at all in most instances, even when the text that’s being adapted is a canonical coming of age narrative like Jane Eyre or Great Expectations.
In this adaptation Anna’s dominant voiceover positions us with her from the outset, filtering our experience of the drama as it unfolds, and creating a pseudo confessional intimacy with the viewer. It speaks to the precursor text and yet it isn’t constrained by it: it takes the drama into different but universally similar emotional territory of relevance to a mainstream 21st century audience.
As with the majority of TV adaptations of canonical 19th century realist novels, film adaptations of Anna Karenina tend to follow the heritage cinema treatment: the camera lingers on period detail and is awash with wide angled panning shots of country mansions and rolling hills.
Screen legends Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh have both starred as Anna (1935, 1948) in period renditions and there have been numerous adaptations (1927, 1997, 2012) since the first silent Anna Karenina in 1911. But like The Beautiful Lie, the latest film adaptation written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright dares to do things differently.
Yes, it’s a costume drama, though a costume drama with a difference and one that tells the story in a manner that departs from Tolstoy’s realist mode of narration. Wright’s film frames the narrative as a piece of theatre; it takes us away from the heat that’s so central to the viewing experience of The Beautiful Lie and into Brechtian territory that places the audience outside the moment as onlooker rather than participant.
For some, this and the textual interventions of Bell and Gavin are a betrayal of the original text. For others, they are inventive ways to prolong the dialogue with a narrative that’s of universal, long-lasting potency.
Just as “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, adaptations re-vision Anna Karenina in their own way but some, like The Beautiful Lie, thankfully take a more audacious approach than others.
The Beautiful Lie screens on Sunday nights at 8.30pm on ABC.
Yvonne Griggs, Lecturer in Media & Communications, University of New England
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Just a quick note – I am currently taking a 2 week break from the Blog for health reasons. Should be back in about 2 weeks. Thanks all
The link below is to an article that looks at a number of clever and creative bookmarks (including pictures).
For more visit:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/bookmark-designs/
The link below is to an article reporting on changes to Kindle Unlimited Payments from tomorrow.
For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/10/30/attention-amazon-is-changing-kindle-unlimited-payout-on-1-november/
The link below is to an article that takes a look at a bookstore-styled hotel in japan.
For more visit:
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2015/10/27/bookstore-styled-tokyo-hostel-has-1700-books-to-read-bunks-in-the-shelves-to-sleep-next-to-them/
The links below are to articles reporting on the closure of ebook subscription service Blloon.
For more visit:
– http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/10/29/the-blloon-has-popped-its-shutting-down-its-subscription-ebook-service/
– http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/blloon-is-shutting-down-their-e-book-subscription-service
What would Dumbledore do? It’s a question that’s galled many die-hard fans of JK Rowling’s phenomenally successfully Harry Potter books since the author last week signed an open letter opposing a cultural boycott of Israel, and instead advocated for cultural dialogue between the two countries.
Their responses have played out in a flurry of Twitterverse exchanges, with many fans arguing that the lesson of the Harry Potter story was, as Helen Lewis summarises in The Guardian:
That talking wasn’t enough to end conflicts. Look at the Wizarding War […] If Harry had tried to coax Lord Voldemort to a UN summit in Geneva rather than destroying his Horcruxes, everyone would have ended up dead. Not just Tonks, Remus Lupin and one of the Weasley twins.
One Potter fan in particular gained media attention with a Facebook letter to the author which presented the argument in the following way:
I am writing to you in response to your public support for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and opposition to the BDS movement in the Guardian’s Culture for Coexistence. As a Palestinian, I have to say that I was completely disappointed when I read about this, because your books have been the very source of all the hope I have for peace and justice in my homeland someday.
Rowling, in her response to the fan, also drew on Dumbledore and the Harry Potter series to make her point, stating that:
I’ve received a lot of messages over the past few days that use my fictional characters to make points about the Israeli cultural boycott. This isn’t a complaint: those characters belong to the readers as well as to me, and each has their own life in the heads of those who have read them. Sometimes the inner lives of characters as imagined by readers are not what I imagined for them, but the joy of books is that we all make our own mental cast.
What began as a debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has since developed into a discussion about whether Rowling had the right to use Dumbledore’s characterisation to support her argument. It’s a discussion that raises interesting questions about the relationship between authors and fans of their work.
According to French theorist Roland Barthes, the author has been dead for many decades, but Barthes was writing before social media gave us unprecedented access to authors’ thoughts and feelings. The author has, in a manner of speaking, been revived. But does this change the audience’s relationship with authorial intent?
Debate on Twitter centred on the appropriateness of Rowling using Dumbledore to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Fans cited his character’s sympathy with pure-blood supremacy in his youth. Others opined Dumbledore is too powerful to stand in for either side in the political debate. Others claim the conflict is too dense to be reflected in an example from Harry Potter.
While the latter point may be valid, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the way Harry Potter books explore grand themes such as racism and discrimination.
Stimpdawg
As fans have noted, the wizarding world becomes obsessed with purging “muggle-borns” during the reign of Voldemort, despite the fact that many talented witches and wizards come from non-magical backgrounds (Hermione Granger, Harry’s best friend and the brightest witch of her age, is a prime example of this).
The desire to attack people who are different is the central concern of the story, and as Rowling herself noted in her Twitter exchange:
It was true in the Potter books and it is true in life that talking will not change wilfully closed minds.
Rowling’s use of a fictional magician to articulate her political beliefs was considered by some to be “misguided” – particularly because, in some cases, fans considered her approach to be a misinterpretation of the spirit of the books. To which Rowling responded:
I can only say that a full discussion of morality within the series is impossible without examining Dumbledore’s actions, because he is the moral heart of the books. He did not consider all weapons equal and he was prepared, always, to go to the hilltop.
What we must remember when discussing the interpretive potential of Dumbledore and the Harry Potter franchise as a whole is that the books are more than just books. Hogwarts is not an object that people can examine objectively – every fan of the Harry Potters series has interpreted it in their own way, and often the way that it is interpreted can say more about the interpreter than it does about the story.
EPA/Andy Rain
There are generally two ways that people tend to approach interpreting the Harry Potter universe: through the canon, which is all of Rowling’s writings and commentary, and extra-textual spaces such as Pottermore.com; or through “fanon”, which is how fans have developed the series through their discussions, fan-produced art and stories, and their “head canons” (or their personal interpretations of characters and events).
Fans have begun to approach Rowling’s extra-textual interpretations of the texts by examining them, deciding whether they fit into their overall interpretation of the work, and either incorporating or discarding them. Readers may embrace the ridiculously-named Fleamont Potter (Harry’s grandfather) but take issue with Rowling’s assertion that Remus Lupin never fell in love before he met Nymphadora Tonks (because many fans interpret him as bisexual, with a potential love interest in Sirius Black).
It is heartening to see Rowling acknowledge the fraught relationship between reader interpretation and authorial intent. In the response Rowling posted on Twitter, titled “Why Dumbledore went to the hilltop”, she wrote:
Sometimes the inner lives of characters as imagined by readers are not what I imagined for them, but the joy of books is that we all make our own mental cast […] All books dealing with morality can be picked apart for those lines and themes that best suit the arguer’s perspective.
There is a question of ownership at work here which will not be resolved through a social media exchange, but it is clear that while the author may have been revived the fans are not taking her words as gospel. At this point, Dumbledore is under the joint custody of JK Rowling and her legion of fans.
Jessica Seymour, Sessional Academic
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that takes a look at ebook reading on Windows Smartphones.
For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/10/28/the-sad-state-of-ebooks-on-windows-smartphones/
At the BookShelf 
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