The link below is to an article that looks at addressing reading slumps.
For more visit:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/the-book-nerds-guide-to-reading-slumps/
Tag Archives: reading
Book Nerd Problems: Reading Multiple Books
E-reading: Tablets or Ebook Readers?
The link below is to an article that takes a look at what is best for ebook reading, tablets or dedicated ebook readers?
For more visit:
http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2016/06/26/tablets-vs-ebook-readers-which-is-better-for-reading/
How should reading be taught in schools?
Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra
When my son was nine years old, he put aside the large Harry Potter novel he had been slowly, but enthusiastically, reading each evening and instead began ploughing through lots of fairly uninspiring books that he brought home from school each day.
It turned out the Year 4 teachers had devised a competition at his school – whichever class read the most books would be rewarded with an end of term pizza party.
The aim, I presume, was to motivate the children to read. It is ironic then that the effect was that my son stopped reading for pleasure and instead began reading for the numbers.
Reading is now increasingly being reduced to a numbers game in schools.
What level is your child at?
At pick up time, parents quiz each other about what reading level their child is on. Inside the school staff room, teachers are directed to have children on level 15, 20 or 30 by the end of the school year.
Six year olds are deciding whether they are good readers or not based on how many books they have ticked off on their take home reader sheet.
These levels are based on algorithms that calculate the ratio of syllables to sentences, or measure word frequency and sentence length.
The rationale is that these formulae can be applied to rank books on a scale of readability and thus guide teachers to match books with children’s reading ability.
There are two key problems with this numbers approach to reading. First, the algorithms are faulty. Second, publishers misuse them.
What makes a book hard or easy to read?
The missing variables in readability algorithms are the authors’ intentions, the readers’ motivations and the teachers’ instruction.
These are key omissions, and they seriously reduce the usability of the algorithms and the credibility of the reading levels they produce.
Fictional stories often use familiar and high frequency vocabulary, and many authors use relatively simple sentence structures.
However the use of literary tools like allegory and metaphor, along with challenging text themes, increases the difficulty of works of fiction in ways that are not captured in readability algorithms.
For example, readability formulae give Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” a reading level suitable for primary school students. They may be able to decode the words on the page but comprehension of the book is less likely.
The same formulae may rank a non-fiction book on dinosaurs, for example, as only suitable for high school students because of its uncommon vocabulary, lengthy sentences and multi-syllabic words.
Yet a child’s interest and familiarity with the topic, or a teacher or parent’s support and instruction, can make that non-fiction book very readable for younger children.
Reading schemes
As readability formulae are not always a good fit for books, the solution has been, instead, to write books which fit the formulae. And publishers have been very keen to supply those books.
These are the books that our children take home each evening. They are written according to the numbers – numbers of high frequency words, numbers of syllables, numbers of words in a sentence.
What is missing in those books is author intention and craft, reader engagement and interest, and teacher support and instruction.
Essentially, then, what is missing in these books is the very essence of reading.
What books should children read?
We have been using the reading scheme system for decades and we still have children struggling to read.
When we use these quasi books to teach reading, we are not adequately preparing them for real reading.
These books, written to fit algorithms, don’t build broad vocabularies in our children. They don’t teach our children how to read complex sentence structures or deal with literary language or read between the lines. In many cases, they turn children off reading altogether.
Children learn to read by reading a book that is a little beyond what they can already read. The gap between what they can read and what they could read is reduced when the child:
- is highly motivated by the content of the book;
- has existing background knowledge about that content;
- is receiving good instruction from a teacher.
We don’t need books arranged in coloured boxes labelled with level numbers to teach a child to read.
Beautifully written pieces of children’s literature will do the job.
Books full of carefully crafted writing by authors whose intentions are to engage, entertain and inform.
Books that teachers can work with in the classroom showing how sounds work in words, and how words work in sentences to make us feel, see or think new things.
Beautiful books that parents can also buy and delight in reading with their children.
Why it matters
The way we teach children to read will fundamentally influence what they understand the purpose of reading to be.
When we teach children to read through schemes that tally their books, we teach them that reading is simply about quantity. If reading is about getting a reward of a pizza, then children are less likely to read for intrinsic rewards.
The claims made for well-written children’s literature are many and varied.
Reading books to your children brings you closer to them, can teach them philosophy and about world issues.
But they can do something else. They can teach our children to read.
Misty Adoniou, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Spacing of letters, not shape of letters, slightly increases reading speed of those with dyslexia
Eva Marinus and Kevin Wheldall
In 2008, a new font designed called “Dyslexie” was labelled “a breakthrough” by the media for reportedly being about to help increase the reading speed of those with dyslexia. It received media attention worldwide. Publishers even announced they were going to publish books in the font.
This is despite there being hardly any empirical evidence for the efficacy of Dyslexie.
We conducted a study to see if Dyslexie is indeed more effective than a commonly used sans serif font (Arial) and, if so, whether this can be explained by its special letter design.
Our results found that the benefits of Dyslexie font were pretty small, and that the slight gain to reading speed was actually down to the spacing of the letters and words rather than the specially designed letter shapes.
The design
Dyslexie’s hallmark is its letter shapes. These shapes have heavy bases which are postulated to suppress the supposed tendency of individuals with dyslexia to mirror-reverse or rotate letters. Dutch artist Christian Boer, who designed the font, aimed to make the letters as distinct as possible from each other to avoid confusion between letters.
Disproving the effectiveness of Dyslexie
In our research we tested 39 English speaking low-progress readers from grades 2 to 6. The children were asked to read texts of similar difficulty in Arial and Dyslexie font that had the same letter-display size, but differed in the degree of word and letter spacing.
Our findings show that the Dyslexie font increased reading speed by just 7%. To put this into perspective, in order to match the reading speed of normal readers at least a 70-100% improvement is needed.
Arial gives same results
Importantly, the same gain could be obtained with Arial font when we enlarged the spacing settings.
In most individuals with dyslexia, the cognitive problems that cause their reading impairment are beyond the early visual letter processing level. Many people with dyslexia struggle to learn the rules for sounding out letters. In this case there is no reason to assume that specific letter shapes would assist in making reading easier.
Previous research has also shown that individuals with dyslexia can benefit to a small extent from larger spacing of objects. This is because they struggle more than their normal reading peers to process objects that are presented closely together. In the case of reading, these objects would be words or letters. However, more research is needed to validate this interpretation.
Based on our research and earlier findings, it is clear that typesetting factors like spacing can only marginally contribute to reading improvement in individuals who struggle with reading.
To significantly improve reading it is important to concentrate on remediation of the specific underlying cause(s) of the reading impairment, like training rules for converting print to speech sounds.
Eva Marinus, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Kevin Wheldall, Emeritus Professor of Education
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
How should reading be taught in schools?
Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra
When my son was nine years old, he put aside the large Harry Potter novel he had been slowly, but enthusiastically, reading each evening and instead began ploughing through lots of fairly uninspiring books that he brought home from school each day.
It turned out the Year 4 teachers had devised a competition at his school – whichever class read the most books would be rewarded with an end of term pizza party.
The aim, I presume, was to motivate the children to read. It is ironic then that the effect was that my son stopped reading for pleasure and instead began reading for the numbers.
Reading is now increasingly being reduced to a numbers game in schools.
What level is your child at?
At pick up time, parents quiz each other about what reading level their child is on. Inside the school staff room, teachers are directed to have children on level 15, 20 or 30 by the end of the school year.
Six year olds are deciding whether they are good readers or not based on how many books they have ticked off on their take home reader sheet.
These levels are based on algorithms that calculate the ratio of syllables to sentences, or measure word frequency and sentence length.
The rationale is that these formulae can be applied to rank books on a scale of readability and thus guide teachers to match books with children’s reading ability.
There are two key problems with this numbers approach to reading. First, the algorithms are faulty. Second, publishers misuse them.
What makes a book hard or easy to read?
The missing variables in readability algorithms are the authors’ intentions, the readers’ motivations and the teachers’ instruction.
These are key omissions, and they seriously reduce the usability of the algorithms and the credibility of the reading levels they produce.
Fictional stories often use familiar and high frequency vocabulary, and many authors use relatively simple sentence structures.
However the use of literary tools like allegory and metaphor, along with challenging text themes, increases the difficulty of works of fiction in ways that are not captured in readability algorithms.
For example, readability formulae give Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” a reading level suitable for primary school students. They may be able to decode the words on the page but comprehension of the book is less likely.
The same formulae may rank a non-fiction book on dinosaurs, for example, as only suitable for high school students because of its uncommon vocabulary, lengthy sentences and multi-syllabic words.
Yet a child’s interest and familiarity with the topic, or a teacher or parent’s support and instruction, can make that non-fiction book very readable for younger children.
Reading schemes
As readability formulae are not always a good fit for books, the solution has been, instead, to write books which fit the formulae. And publishers have been very keen to supply those books.
These are the books that our children take home each evening. They are written according to the numbers – numbers of high frequency words, numbers of syllables, numbers of words in a sentence.
What is missing in those books is author intention and craft, reader engagement and interest, and teacher support and instruction.
Essentially, then, what is missing in these books is the very essence of reading.
What books should children read?
We have been using the reading scheme system for decades and we still have children struggling to read.
When we use these quasi books to teach reading, we are not adequately preparing them for real reading.
These books, written to fit algorithms, don’t build broad vocabularies in our children. They don’t teach our children how to read complex sentence structures or deal with literary language or read between the lines. In many cases, they turn children off reading altogether.
Children learn to read by reading a book that is a little beyond what they can already read. The gap between what they can read and what they could read is reduced when the child:
- is highly motivated by the content of the book;
- has existing background knowledge about that content;
- is receiving good instruction from a teacher.
We don’t need books arranged in coloured boxes labelled with level numbers to teach a child to read.
Beautifully written pieces of children’s literature will do the job.
Books full of carefully crafted writing by authors whose intentions are to engage, entertain and inform.
Books that teachers can work with in the classroom showing how sounds work in words, and how words work in sentences to make us feel, see or think new things.
Beautiful books that parents can also buy and delight in reading with their children.
Why it matters
The way we teach children to read will fundamentally influence what they understand the purpose of reading to be.
When we teach children to read through schemes that tally their books, we teach them that reading is simply about quantity. If reading is about getting a reward of a pizza, then children are less likely to read for intrinsic rewards.
The claims made for well-written children’s literature are many and varied.
Reading books to your children brings you closer to them, can teach them philosophy and about world issues.
But they can do something else. They can teach our children to read.
Misty Adoniou, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Book Nerd Problems: Falling Asleep While Reading
Is there a right way to learn to read?
Emily Harrison, Birmingham City University
Phonics teaching in UK primary schools is rightly recognised as giving children the essential building blocks needed to become successful readers. Indeed, we are so pro-phonics that little is done to raise awareness about other methods, even those which might be seen as an accompaniment to phonics, not a replacement for it.
Schools tend to stick to what they know and, with more and more demand being put on teachers to raise standards and achieve excellent Ofsted reports, there is little in the way of “free time” to be allocated to testing out new methods, even those aimed at children who have had phonics training but who still have reading difficulties.
Phonics is based on training children’s “segmental phonological awareness” (that is, raising their awareness of letters and sounds and teaching them segmenting and blending skills). But there is a second part to phonological awareness known as “suprasegmental phonology”. It refers to the rhythmic components of spoken language that accompany the segmental elements, such as stress placement, intonation or pitch, and timing.
There is a growing body of evidence which supports the idea that awareness of, or sensitivity to, these rhythmic components is related to reading at various levels, including reading acquisition, comprehension and, more interestingly, reading difficulties. What this means is that children who have reading difficulties also tend to have poor speech rhythm sensitivity – and the better a child’s speech rhythm sensitivity is, the better their reading skills tend to be.
Surely, if we can somehow improve childrens’ speech rhythm sensitivity, their reading skills will also improve, right?
During my time at Coventry University, this question interested us enormously, yet there was no intervention that had attempted to train children on their awareness of speech rhythm as a possible way of enhancing literacy skills. So we set about designing a set of materials to help children gain better awareness of these rhythmic elements of spoken language.
We wanted the intervention to be suitable for children who were non-verbal – that is, children who do not speak, whether this is due to a disorder or just shyness – as well as children across a range of ability levels, so we decided on a picture and sound format, where children were presented with a picture card and a corresponding prerecorded audio sound for each item. This meant that children didn’t have to give a verbal response and that the format of delivery was repetitive to ensure some level of understanding between sessions. The intervention was designed to run for ten weeks, giving time for pre and post-test assessments to be administered within a school term.
We ran two experiments, one with reception children, age four to five years of age, who were just starting to learn to read – and one with children in year three, aged seven to eight years, who were falling behind in their reading. In each study, the intervention was compared to a traditional phonological awareness intervention and a control.
Reading rhythms
The results were very promising. In both the beginners and the older struggling readers, the speech rhythm intervention resulted in significantly greater gains in reading than the control intervention. This means that speech rhythm training is effective both at the beginning of reading tuition and once children have already received some formal training.
One of the things that interested us most is that the children in the second study were categorised as being struggling readers. For the speech rhythm intervention to work for these children is heartening and important. It means that this could be an alternative way in to teaching these children the skills they need to become successful readers.
Two papers describing similar findings, supporting the notion of speech rhythm training in struggling readers, have also since been published. However, there are no other studies to date which have investigated the effects of such training methods for beginner readers.
What our research adds is that speech rhythm training can also be effective in children who have yet to receive formal reading tuition, meaning that it can be implemented effectively from the start of primary education.
This is an exciting prospect for reading researchers – and it opens many doors for further investigation. It also has the potential to significantly improve reading instruction in schools – and will in fact soon be doing so, through a new programme which incorporates this speech rhythm sensitivity training.
Emily Harrison, Lecturer in Applied Psychology, Birmingham City University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Ebook Reading and Your Brain
The link below is to an article that looks at ebook reading and whether doing so is bad for the brain – hmmm, I doubt it.
For more visit:
http://www.brit.co/brain-ebooks-versus-traditional-books/
Reading for moral self-improvement or therapy can occasionally feel a little grim
Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia
This week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival not only celebrates the art of writing, but the art of reading. Of course, it is difficult not to worry that this might be because the art of reading – that is, deep, critical, transformative reading – has been so radically transformed in the age of big data and Internet skimming that – along with ink and paper – it might be considered to be endangered, too.
Much of the program seems focused on the special kind of paying attention that reading demands – and its pay off in intangible commodities such as curiosity, wonder and awe. It features events that are dedicated not just to the new, but to the enduring influence of the old, in which writers have been asked to talk less about their own work, and more about the works of others that inspired them.
Deborah Adelaide talks about The Women’s Pages (2015), but also about her lifelong fascination with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that inspired it. Frank Moorhouse talks about reading that Victorian marvel George Eliot, and the debt that his own capacious volumes featuring Edith Campbell Berry might owe to it.
Gail Jones talks about the strange excitement of reading Nabokov. Don Watson, in conversation Delia Falconer, discusses the wondrous works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Tegan Bennett Daylight brings the spotlight to bear on the wry, self-deprecating humour of the mid-twentieth century American short-form author JS Perelmen, who may well be new to festival audiences. Jonathan Franzen, in conversation with Daylight, not only talks about Purity (2015), his latest book, but also his vociferous reading life, encompassing the works of obscure and dazzling authors who are seldom read today, including, no doubt, Franzen’s long-standing infatuation with the scathing social satires of the early twentieth-century Austrian writer, Karl Kraus.
There are many different kinds of reading. The festival concentrates on the sort that brings art and life together. Artistic Director Jemma Birrell says, “A good festival, like a good book, should bring real-life benefits.“ Consequently, the program bristles with panels on the Books that Made Me, the Books that Changed Me, and the Books that Saved Me. It features a Literary Healing Room tended by bibliotherapists – that is, book doctors – who administer small doses of book buying as remedy and solace in an alienated world. (You can find these curious doctors at the School of Life in Sydney, Melbourne, and London, where they can be consulted in person or via Skype, at all hours.)
Marcel Proust, with his unsparing insight into human passions and illusions, recognised that there are “pathological circumstances” in which reading can become a sort of “curative discipline”.
But there’s something a little disquieting in the therapeutic cure. I find it odd, for example, that you can also purchase a “philosopher’s jumper” made of trendy black wool from the School of Life’s online shop – a touch overpriced at A$258.94 – in the hope that it will bestow wisdom or insight whenever you wear it. (It’s advertised as modelled on one that belonged to Martin Heidegger, which also seems an odd choice, given Heidegger was a Nazi.)
Also at the festival, philosopher Damon Young talks about the “ethics of reading” and the “virtues” that he claims reading engenders. In an era of clickbate, when articles have transformed into listicles, in which many of us struggle to read a text more than 140 characters long – and more are happy to outsource our critical capacities to a data algorithm known as Google – reading a book certainly demands something that is increasingly harder to find.
According to Young, reading has the capacity to teach us curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice, to gloss the chapters of his recent book, The Art of Reading (2016).
In Young’s model of reading, it is not the book but the reader who bring these virtues into being. He argues – as, indeed, literary scholars have argued for several decades – that it may not be the reader who writes the book, but it is the reader who completes its meaning.
It is the imagination of the reader that brings the book into existence. Without a reader, a book is just a strange pattern of black marks on a page.
It is not that Young confuses art and life. He argues,
Ordinary life has a hazy atmosphere to it, whereas language illuminates brightly and sharply.
Life, in short, is much harder to navigate.
Young’s model of reading for moral self-improvement, like the bibliotherapists’ model of reading for therapy, or the current Sydney festival’s model of reading for life, can occasionally feel a little grim and prescriptive, because they skip over the idea of reading for pleasure or plain fun.
It is often a mistake to go straight for what is said, ignoring how it is said. However tempting it may be to feel that novels contain a world complete, novelistic characters are, as Samuel Beckett unkindly said of Balzac, mere “clockwork cabbages” in comparison to real people.
Books bring solace because they provide meaning when life does not. They do this because they are aesthetically patterned in a way that the real world is not.
Sometimes it is just the happy syntax of a sentence – the way it unwinds and surprises and satisfies. In this, books can also be deceptive. The fact is, how something is said is more often than not the thing that makes the reader feel what they do.
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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