Literature textbooks used in secondary schools in Alberta reflect the belief that not only does literature have the power to change and shape our thinking, but also that the non-White voices of the culture need to be heard if Canada is to become a country which truly welcomes and values cultural diversity. The realization that many high school students in the Crowsnest Pass area of Southern Alberta held negative stereotypes about Canadian Aboriginal people prompted this study which measured how effective studying literature written by Aboriginal writers was in reducing prejudice. Within each grade, individual students showed significant attitude changes. In all grades, female students had significantly lower scores than males, both pre - and post-test, evidence that there are perhaps different stages of moral development in females than males. Qualitative data revealed an increased understanding of Aboriginal issues and student attempts to view the world from a non-White perspective. This study documents successful and unsuccessful methods of combating racism in the classroom and will be valuable to teachers and all those planning to work with children.

This book aims to present the power of the African American oral folk traditions. It shows how a simple folk song is able to embody past and present, family origins and cultural identity at the same time. In Song of Solomon Morrison calls the attention of the African American community to the fact that if they are unaware of their folk heritage they can never own a self-conscious identity. It has a paramount significance to know the past of the ancestors in the lives of both an individual and a whole community, too. This book follows Milkman's, the protagonist's, quest for self- and cultural identity. Morrison made a folk song adjusted to the plot of the novel that was used as a complement parallel to the development of Milkman's mature identity. The revival of the oral folk traditions makes the protagonist a self-conscious member of his community. In this book the reader can follow the development of Milkman's indentity parallel with the song, and can learn my final conclusion in broaden dimensions.

In this work I intend to explore the impacts of the Oriental and Western values, trends and views of life in E. E. Cummings's art. Considering that he was an avant-garde poet and a Cubist painter, the avant-garde trends in his poetry are supposed to be analyzed; then, some features of Zen philosophy - which sometimes is called a religion, sometimes a way of thinking, or sometimes even a technique - are meant to be presented. Since haiku is the literary expression of Zen, the haiku pictures of E.E Cummings's poetry are one of my main topics. My aim is to explore the specificity of Cummings's poetry; since, he has found the common concepts of Zen and avant-garde trends, which - in a superficial comparison - seem to be strongly different from each other. Cummings's evergreen and unique approach to letters, his experiments with the expressive power of the fragmented words and the fragmented experience lying behind the letter-particles can repeatedly delight everyone who is interested in the mysterious process of creation.

When Latin-American drama professor Frank Dauster brought Mexican poet and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950) to the attention of the English-reading public in 1971, more than two decades had passed since Villaurrutia's death. Known to a Spanish-speaking audience as a poet concerned with death, Villaurrutia wrote both poetry and drama. However, his first full-length play, Invitacin a la Muerte, in 1947 marked the height of his dramatic career. The effort to connect the play to William Shakespeare's Hamlet brings Villaurrutia's work into a curious relationship with the famous tragedy. As this book reveals, Villaurrutia's reliance on Shakespeare permits him to dramatize the anguish affecting humankind in the twentieth century. This agony is at the center of Alberto's discomfort, intensified by the elements around which a modern-day Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius, Horatio, and Polonius must grapple. When we confront Alberto, we see into the heart of the modern dilemma, a struggle not far from Shakespeare's Elsinore.

Within The House on Mango Street, Cisneros weaves several subtle literary allusions, mostly from fairy tales, into many of her vignettes. These subtle allusions help Cisneros create a portrait of expected feminine roles, mostly women as victims, within the patriarchal community, which, when juxtaposed with Esperanza's ideals for herself and her inner strength and drive, help distinguish her as different from those around her. Because she is different and stronger than the other women in her community, Esperanza will be able to reject the other female role models presented by both the women in her community and the women in the fairy tales she has been inundated with her entire life. The rejection of the models that have been presented to her will allow her to instead create her own story where she will be able to 'live happily ever after' on her own terms and not to rely on waiting for someone else to save her. Her escape will allow her to finally escape the poverty and oppression of her community, but will also give her the strength to return to save the other women from similar trappings, thereby becoming their figurative Prince Charming.

In mid twentieth century Britain, after the experience of total war, evil was not an abstract concept but a palpable reality. How was evil understood, and how did this understanding influence notions of English national identity? This book examines the lives and works of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, members of the British literary club Inklings. It probes representations of evil, Englishness, gender and the erotic in their fiction and shows specifically how their science fiction, horror, and fantasy was a response to the moral and human devastation of two world wars. The book suggests that the Inkling's middle brow literature opens a window on a wider sense of uncertainty and longing about Englishness in the eve of decolonization and decline, while showing that the philosophical and theological make up of the group was more diverse than has been previousely represented.

Journal prompts that are appropriate for junior and senior high students are sometimes difficult to find. Equally difficult to find are writing prompts that also strengthen vocabulary. "Journal Prompts for Secondary Students" does both. This resource includes a variety of age-appropriate topics for each week of the school year, vocabulary terms, and weekly and quarter assessment devices.

"Journal Prompts for Secondary Students" is a great Language Arts supplemental resource. Teachers can use the prompts to transition into the day's lesson, to motivate reluctant writers, and to strengthen writing and vocabulary skills. Any writer can benefit from the thought-provoking prompt challenges.

Whether you are a teacher needing a writing and vocabulary text to supplement your curriculum or you are a writer looking for inspiration, this book is for you.

Scientific Discourse examines the nature of scientific inquiry in the primary school classroom to show how this interacts with early literacy. Through an examination of the texts used and produced by pupils studying science the author shows how what is at work in this context of scientific discourse is actually multiliteracy. The teacher aids the pupils' learning using different forms of literacy spread across the spoken word, written text, visual text and physical action. The result of this diverse approach is a growth not only in scientific knowledge, but basic literacy. The book provides a theoretical introduction to developmental literacy theory, current positions of science education and advanced theories of multiliteracy and genre theory. The new theory of scientific discourse presented in this book will be of interest to researchers of applied linguistics, discourse analysis and education.

Inspire your middle school readers with these awesome reading motivation programs and proven book recommendations! * Written by a seasoned middle school librarian who knows what kids love to read * Step-by-step directions for battle of the books and other sure-fire reading motivation programs * Chocked full of titles to turn middle-schoolers into avid readers * Includes bonus reproducibles for your very own reading promotion programs * Annotated genre bibliographies to motivate middle school readers Meet the reading needs of a diverse school population, one in transition between elementary and the high school years and learn to have fun while getting serious about promoting Voluntary Free Reading (VFR) in your school. Frustrated librarians and teachers will get excellent examples of reading motivation programs and recommended, sure-to-please reading lists for hard-to-motivate middle grade students. This book is meant to be a resource for the librarian who must respond to the student who asks, "Do you have any good books?"

Offering a comparative analysis of "community-literacy studies," COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS traces common values in diverse accounts of "ordinary people going public." Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a "local" public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference. COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS also examines pedagogies that educators can use to help students to go public in the course of their rhetorical education at college. the concluding chapter adapts local-public literacies to college curricula and examines how these literate moves elicit different kinds of engagement from students and require different kinds of scaffolding from teachers and community educators. A glossary and annotated bibliography provide the basis for further inquiry and research. ABOUT THE AUTHOR After completing a postdoctoral fellowship through Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center and Carnegie Mellon University, Elenore Long continued to direct community-literacy initiatives with Wayne Peck and Joyce Baskins. With Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins, she published LEARNING TO RIVAL: A LITERATE PRACTICE FOR INTERCULTURAL INQUIRy. They recently published a fifteen-year retrospective for the COMMUNITY LITERACY JOURNAL. She currently directs the composition program and Writers' Center at Eastern Washington University. ADVANCE PRAISE . . . "COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS is the perfect entry to the exuberant practice of literacy in community. It brings contemporary research to life-in people, stories, and purposes. And it documents the amazingly diverse ways ordinary people go public. Moreover, Elenore Long's imaginative theoretical framework lets us understand and critically compare alternative images of local public life-from the literate worlds of church women, writing groups, and street gangs to the performances of community organizing, street theater, and local think tanks. Long's analytical and profoundly rhetorical insight is to compare community literacies in terms of their framing metaphors, privileged practices, and processes of rhetorical invention. And that is perhaps what makes the final chapter such a pedagogical powerhouse-a brilliantly critical and concrete guide to supporting our students and ourselves in local literate action." -Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon "Elenore Long's COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS begins to articulate a history for community literacy studies, and such a history is essential for helping us figure out where we are going with this area of inquiry. Long provides a new set of tools as well, and her local publics framework, in particular, will prove valuable to researchers and teachers alike." -Jeff Grabill

Memory is not a thing that we call upon, it is an event that we experience. Each time we speak, we do not access a memory, but create a new memory - we compose a new memory event. Our memory is a constant decomposition and recomposition process, and this process, in many ways, is who we are. Our everyday communication is governed by a complex cognitive process so innate in our neurological composition that we rarely pause to consider it. Their Synaptic Selves examines the cognitive shifts that memory events force in our everyday language. It explores how authors like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce interpret these types of events, specifically discussing how spatialization and mapping affect memory. For these authors, it is the failure of memory (and its linguistic manifestation) that teaches us how we think. By looking at these moments of failure or slippage in light of philosophers like Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze we can come to understand more fully the complex and elusive approaches through which these authors deal with memory and its role in language. Only then can we begin to examine the way we actually use language and read texts today.

This is the first book on health literacy specifically for and by librarians.Nearly a quarter of the U.S. population struggles with low literacy - and low health literacy. The inability to read, understand, and effectively utilize health information is linked to higher levels of chronic disease, more frequent emergency room visits, and early mortality. The cost and quality of care implications are enormous, and health literacy is a hot topic for policy makers and researchers - and for libraries struggling to respond to patrons' unmet health information needs.This authoritative MLA guide will help you understand the vital role that medical, hospital, public, and health libraries are uniquely qualified to play in improving health literacy. You will learn innovative ways to use collection development, the reference interview, community health information, and Web resources, as well as strategies for working with special needs populations, including seniors, the disabled, ESL groups, and people of diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Case studies illustrate best practices, including ways to partner with health care providers and other organizations to create and fund health literacy programming in your community and make your library a vital player in this increasingly important information needs area.

The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World carries the interrelated stories of publishing, writing, and reading from the beginning of the colonial period in America up to 1790. Three major themes run through the volume: the persisting connections between the book trade in the Old World and the New, evidenced in modes of intellectual and cultural exchange and the dominance of imported, chiefly English books; the gradual emergence of a competitive book trade in which newspapers were the largest form of production; and the institution of a ""culture of the Word,"" organized around an essentially theological understanding of print, authorship, and reading, complemented by other frameworks of meaning that included the culture of republicanism. ""The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World"" also traces the histories of literary and learned culture, censorship and ""freedom of the press,"" and literacy and orality.

These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium 'The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature' at Halic University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of blogging (Leman Giresunlu), and therapeutic narrative (Wendy Ryden). A second group-whose concern often heavily overlaps with the first in that it also pursues theoretical goals-concentrates on individual authors and artists: Saba Altinsay and Dido Sotiriou (Banu Ozel), Samuel Beckett (Oya Berk), the sculptor Alexander Calder (Barbara B. Zabel), G. Thomas Couser and his filial memoir, Moris Farhi (Bronwyn Mills), Jean Genet (Clare Brandabur), Henry James (Laurence Raw), Orhan Pamuk (Dilek Doltas; Ayse F. Ece), Sylvia Plath (Richard J. Larschan), Edouard Roditi (Clifford Endres), Sara Rosenberg (Claire Emilie Martin), the dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai (Leena Chandorkar), Alev Tekinay (Ozlem Ogut), Uwe Timm (Jutta Birmele), and female British and American Oriental travellers (Tea Jansson).

Librarians can stay relevant in the twenty-first century when they build on those areas where they have excelled. Service to children is one of those, and a hot topic is emergent literacy, the earliest phases of literacy development. Because parents are a child's first teacher, they need to understand that children who enter school with a larger vocabulary are more likely to succeed in school and that they can offer experiences for their pre-school children to prepare them for school. This book provides six sessions for a children's librarian to use to introduce literacy skills to parents of preschool children. These sessions teach parents how to give their child an opportunity to explore and experience new things. Designed to be conducted in two simultaneous units, one for parents and one for children, handouts and activities are included. These are especially helpful for helping parents who will be able to make most of the teaching devices rather than purchasing expensive commercial items. The hot topic for children's librarians building their pre-school programming is emergent literacy, the earliest phases of literacy development. A brief introduction to the research in emergent literacy and some examples of successful programs are given. Because parents are a child's first teacher, they need to understand that children who enter school with a larger vocabulary are more likely to succeed in school and that they can offer experiences for their pre-school children to prepare them for school. This book provides six sessions for a children's library to use to introduce literacy skills to parents of preschool children. These sessions teach parents how to give their child an opportunity to explore and experience new things. Designed to be conducted in two simultaneous units, one for parents and one for children, handouts and activities are included. These are especially helpful for parents who will be able to make the most of the teaching devices rather than purchasing expensive commercial items. This would be especially helpful as a training manual for solo children's librarians who must use volunteers to conduct the children's workshop.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. Yet that truism is never remembered when our functional illiteracy disaster is being discussed by "experts," and so the same errors are repeated, decade after decade, and even century after century. The Case for the Prosecution and the two papers following it were originally published in 1981, 1982, and 1983. They reported on the author's extensive library and oral-reading-accuracy research which turned up the historical causes for functional illiteracy and the proven solution for it, and also why that proven solution has so often been mislabeled as poison. In the intervening decades since these three papers came out, they have never been cited in any of the enormously expensive U.S. Government reading research programs or in any publications by so-called "experts" in the reading instruction "establishment." However, since these papers contain much historical detail which is not repeated in the author's more recent works, they are being re-issued for those non-Governmental and non-"establishment" readers who are interested in learning the real facts.

Get solid learning results with phonics! Teach students in grades K-1 the basics of phonemic awareness to increase reading skills
- These lessons include playful story hour rhymes and activities to provide direct instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness targeted to get solid learning results
- The lessons are easy-to-implement and correlated to national standards. They are a perfect resource for helping your students make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)
- Included in the book are original, instructional, reproducible black line masters!

Margaret Atwood's novels are photographs of her characters' lives: while words only ever describe her protagonists' blurred visions of their pasts, their 'true' stories are told in subtexts which run parallel or even contrary to the main story line and which depict the unseen, the buried, the 'untrue'. Replete with intertextual references, her fiction illuminates that and why " w]hat isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light" (The Blind Assassin). She plays with our conventional modes of perception to make us aware of the way we frame reality in our minds. In her book, Andrea Strolz discusses the interrelation between metafictional and intertextual features in two of Atwood's novels that share many similarities, even though written in different decades. She examines how Atwood weaves intertextual references into her fiction, how she facilitates a reader's recognition of the intertexts, and she shows that Atwood's narrator-prota-gonists also reflect on our age as one of intertextuality.

This collection of essays examines how our visual and language systems interact in relationship to reading.
Addresses four important questions concerning the role of vision in reading
Presents recent findings from neuroimaging literature along with important recent work concerning how letters and letter strings are processed
Investigates what constraints the visual system and eye movement control set on visual word recognition
Discusses the role of the left and right visual field, together with the right and left hemispheres in visual word recognition
Evaluates what information the brain computes when we read a word questions the contribution of the visual system on reading disability

These proceedings of the symposium 'The Rhetoric of Sociopolitical Power and Representations of Victimhood in Contemporary Literature, ' conducted by the Department of American Culture and Literature at Halic University, Istanbul, on 13-15 April 2005 contain discussions of power and victimization as represented in contemporary literatures in light of the leading questions and issues in contemporary literary criticism, the emphasis being on writing from the Anglophone world.The authors treated include Angela Carter, Colm Toibin, Alan Hollinghurst, Tony Harrison, Henry James, David Mamet, Anne Sexton, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, J. M. Coetzee, Jean Anouilh, Thomas Mann, Ricardo Piglia, Luisa Valenzuela, Naguib Mahfouz, Kemal Yalcin, Orhan Pamuk, Kobo Abe

Bad grammar, emoticons, acronyms, and poor spelling are ubiquitous in cyberspace, and especially prevalent in teen communications-both within and outside of the Internet-even in the classroom. Are today's technologies-email, chat, IM, blogging, and electronic games-ruining the reading and writing skills of teens? This author proposes that, because the technology often defines how one communicates, today's teens are actually exploring and developing new literacies, and learning to use technology in the most effective ways possible. After examining some of the specific technologies used by teenagers, she considers how these technologies affect reading, writing, and communication habits and skills; and how they are creating new communities of learning. Ultimately, she demonstrates that technologies are (and should be) redefining what we mean by literacy, and explains how, by integrating technologies into programs and services, educators can maximize the learning that teens acquire in using new technologies. A positive take on the issues surrounding technology and literacy, and a "must-read" for anyone who works with teens in grades 6 and up. In addition, the book includes a discussion of why librarians and teachers need to educate administrators and the public about the role of new literacies in teen lives. Support materials, such as scripts to use in explaining new literacies enhance the text.