Mirroring worldwide debates on social class, literacy rates, and social change, this study explores the intersection between reading and social class in Singapore, one of the top scorers on the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) tests, and questions the rhetoric of social change that does not take into account local spaces and practices. This comparative study of reading practices in an elite school and a government school in Singapore draws on practice and spatial perspectives to provide critical insight into how taken-for-granted practices and spaces of reading can be in fact unacknowledged spaces of inequity. Acknowledging the role of social class in shaping reading education is a start to reconfiguring current practices and spaces for more effective and equitable reading practices. This book shows how using localized, contextualized approaches sensitive to the home, school, national and global contexts can lead to more targeted policy and practice transformation in the area of reading instruction and intervention. Chapters in the book include: * Becoming a Reader: Home-School Connections * Singaporean Boys Constructing Global Literate Selves: School-Nation Connections * Levelling the Reading Gap: Socio-Spatial Perspectives The book will be relevant to literacy scholars and educators, library science researchers and sociologists interested in the intersection of class and literacy practices in the 21st century.

Contents:
Introduction, Albert Classen. Varying degrees of light - Bonaventure and the medieval book of nature, Ashlynn K.Pai. Reading that transforms: Virgil's hero reborn in 12th-century vernacular representations, Raymond Cormier. Reading and the book: frame and story in the old French Dolopathos, Penny Simons. The book and reading in medieval high German literature, Albert Classen. Book metaphors in the textual community, Jean-Marie Kauth. The language of the text: authorship and textuality in Pearl, The Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman, Burt Kimmelman. Building Christian narrative: the rhetoric of knowledge, revelation and interpretation in Libro de Apolonio, Patricia E.Grieve. Chaucer's literate characters reading their texts - interpreting infinite regression, or the narcissus syndrome, Jean E.Jost. Story, picture and reading in Wynkyn de Worde's Vitas Patrum, Sue Ellen Holbrook. Reading the virgin reader, David Linton. Maria Legens-Maria Legere. St Marys as an ideal reader and St Mary as a textbook, Winfred Frey.

Originally published in 2000. This book provides insights, practical suggestions and clear-cut strategies for integrating media across the K-12 curriculum. This contribution to teaching and curriculum design uses students' own media experiences or media vignettes from students' lives to enter teaching and learning. It provides a road map for teachers longing to reflect and take seriously the knowledge students bring to school from their homes and communities, and to draw upon this background to develop students' critical thinking, viewing and reading of written texts, visuals, and other electronic images and messages.

Teaching Academic Literacy provides a unique outlook on a first-year writing program's evolution by bringing together a group of related essays that analyze, from various angles, how theoretical concepts about writing actually operate in real students' writing. Based on the beginning writing program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a course that asks students to consider what it means to be a literate member of a community, the essays in the collection explore how students become (and what impedes their progress in becoming) authorities in writing situations. Key features of this volume include: * demonstrations of how research into specific teaching problems (e.g., the problem of authority in beginning writers' work) can be conducted by examining student work through a variety of lenses such as task interpretation, collaboration, and conference, so that instructors can understand what factors influence students, and can then use what they have learned to reshape their teaching practices; * adaptability of theory and research to develop a course that engages basic writers with challenging ideas; * a model of how a large writing program can be administered, particularly in regards to the integration of research and curriculum development; and * integration of literary and composition theories.

"Electronic Literacies" is an insightful study of the challenges and contradictions that arise as culturally and linguistically diverse learners engage in new language and literacy practices in online environments.
The role of the Internet in changing literacy and education has been a topic of much speculation, but very little concrete research. This book is one of the first attempts to document the role of the Internet and other new digital technologies in the development of language and literacy. Warschauer looks at how the nature of reading and writing is changing, and how those changes are being addressed in the classroom. His focus is on the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse learners who are at special risk of being marginalized from the information society.
Based on a two-year ethnographic study of the uses of the Internet in four language and writing classrooms in the state of Hawai'i--a Hawaiian language class of Native Hawaiian students seeking to revitalize their language and culture; an ESL class of students from Pacific Island and Latin American countries; an ESL class of students from Asian countries; and an English composition class of working-class students from diverse ethnic backgrounds--the book includes data from interviews with students and teachers, classroom observations, and analysis of student texts. This rich ethnographic data is combined with theories from a broad range of disciplines to develop conclusions about the relationship of technology to language, literacy, education, and culture. Central to Warschauer's discussion and conclusions is how contradictions of language, culture, and class affect the impact of Internet-based education. While Hawai'i is a special place, the issues confronted here are similar in many ways to those that exist throughout the United States and many other countries: How to provide culturally and linguistically diverse students traditionally on the educational and technological margins with the literacies they need to fully participate in public, community, and economic life in the 21st century.

This volume presents in-depth investigations of the processes of meaning-making during reading at both local (discourse) and global (general knowledge) levels. It considerably extends our knowledge of how mental representations are constructed and updated during reading. The book also provides insight into the process of representation construction by using online measures and relating this process with final memory representations; provides detailed models of these processes; pays attention to the coordination of multiple representations constructed; focuses on the monitoring and updating of mental representations; and applies all this knowledge to richer and more complicated texts than are often used in laboratories.

"Electronic Literacies" is an insightful study of the challenges and contradictions that arise as culturally and linguistically diverse learners engage in new language and literacy practices in online environments.
The role of the Internet in changing literacy and education has been a topic of much speculation, but very little concrete research. This book is one of the first attempts to document the role of the Internet and other new digital technologies in the development of language and literacy. Warschauer looks at how the nature of reading and writing is changing, and how those changes are being addressed in the classroom. His focus is on the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse learners who are at special risk of being marginalized from the information society.
Based on a two-year ethnographic study of the uses of the Internet in four language and writing classrooms in the state of Hawai'i--a Hawaiian language class of Native Hawaiian students seeking to revitalize their language and culture; an ESL class of students from Pacific Island and Latin American countries; an ESL class of students from Asian countries; and an English composition class of working-class students from diverse ethnic backgrounds--the book includes data from interviews with students and teachers, classroom observations, and analysis of student texts. This rich ethnographic data is combined with theories from a broad range of disciplines to develop conclusions about the relationship of technology to language, literacy, education, and culture. Central to Warschauer's discussion and conclusions is how contradictions of language, culture, and class affect the impact of Internet-based education. While Hawai'i is a special place, the issues confronted here are similar in many ways to those that exist throughout the United States and many other countries: How to provide culturally and linguistically diverse students traditionally on the educational and technological margins with the literacies they need to fully participate in public, community, and economic life in the 21st century.

One of the most important challenges teachers face is making sure children can read. It is an absolutely crucial skill, and current educational policy is giving it a very high priority. Based on one of the largest studies ever undertaken of what primary schools do to improve literacy, this book reports what Professor Ted Wragg and his research team found. The importance placed on literacy has never been greater. When children learn to read, they are laying the foundations for their entire educational future. Effective teachers can make a huge difference, as a poor start can hinder children throughout their schooling and beyond. By looking at what actually goes on in classrooms, this volume provides an invaluable insight into what happens to children and how their reading progresses. It shows how particular teachers manage the improvement of their pupils' reading levels, and also follows individual pupils through a school year. This is a very readbale account of a fascinating and crucial area of research that is highly topical. Every class teacher should read it.

During the past decades, literacy has gradually become a major concern all over the world. Though there is a great diversity in both the distribution and degree of literacy in different countries, there has been an increasing awareness of the number of illiterates and the consequences of being illiterate. However, literacy is no longer seen as a universal trait. When one focuses on culturally-sensitive accounts of reading and writing practices, the concept of literacy as a single trait does not seem very feasible. A multiplicity of literacy practices can be distinguished which are related to specific cultural contexts and associated with relations of power and ideology. As such, literacy can be seen as a lifelong context-bound set of practices in which an individual's needs vary with time and place.
This volume explores the use of literacy outside the mainstream in different contexts throughout the world. It is divided into four sections. Section 1 presents an anthropological perspective--analyzing the society and the individual in a society. Section 2 presents a psychological perspective--focusing on the individuals themselves and analyzing the cognitive and affective development of young children as they acquire literacy in their first and second languages. Section 3 presents an educational perspective--highlighting the variations in educational approaches in different societies as well as the outcomes of these approaches. Section 4 summarizes the studies presented in this volume. Both theoretical issues and educational implications related to the development of literacy in two languages are discussed. An attempt is also made to open up new directions in the study of literacy development in multilingual contexts by bringing these various disciplinary perspectives together.

In this book, Kathleen Tyner examines the tenets of literacy through a historical lens to demonstrate how new communication technologies are resisted and accepted over time. New uses of information for teaching and learning create a "disconnect" in the complex relationship between literacy and schooling, and raise questions about the purposes of literacy in a global, networked, educational environment. The way that new communication technologies change the nature of literacy in contemporary society is discussed as a rationale for corresponding changes in schooling.
Digital technologies push beyond alphabetic literacy to explore the way that sound, image, and text can be incorporated into education. Attempts to redefine literacy terms--computer, information, technology, visual, and media literacies--proliferate and reflect the need to rethink entrenched assumptions about literacy. These multiple literacies are advanced to help users make sense of the information glut by fostering the ability to access, analyze, and produce communication in a variety of forms.
Tyner explores the juncture between two broad movements that hope to improve education: educational technology and media education. A comparative analysis of these two movements develops a vision of teaching and learning that is critical, hands on, inquiry-based, and suitable for life in a mobile, global, participatory democracy.

During the past decades, literacy has gradually become a major concern all over the world. Though there is a great diversity in both the distribution and degree of literacy in different countries, there has been an increasing awareness of the number of illiterates and the consequences of being illiterate. However, literacy is no longer seen as a universal trait. When one focuses on culturally-sensitive accounts of reading and writing practices, the concept of literacy as a single trait does not seem very feasible. A multiplicity of literacy practices can be distinguished which are related to specific cultural contexts and associated with relations of power and ideology. As such, literacy can be seen as a lifelong context-bound set of practices in which an individual's needs vary with time and place.
This volume explores the use of literacy outside the mainstream in different contexts throughout the world. It is divided into four sections. Section 1 presents an anthropological perspective--analyzing the society and the individual in a society. Section 2 presents a psychological perspective--focusing on the individuals themselves and analyzing the cognitive and affective development of young children as they acquire literacy in their first and second languages. Section 3 presents an educational perspective--highlighting the variations in educational approaches in different societies as well as the outcomes of these approaches. Section 4 summarizes the studies presented in this volume. Both theoretical issues and educational implications related to the development of literacy in two languages are discussed. An attempt is also made to open up new directions in the study of literacy development in multilingual contexts by bringing these various disciplinary perspectives together.

The demands made on literacy teachers are ever-changing, and the range of those demands is expanding in crucial ways as we approach the millennium. This introduction to the major themes of literacy education aims to inform discussions while encouraging literacy teachers to reflect on their work. This comprehensive book studies work with students through all years of formal education, and in a number of different subject areas. Predominant concerns include the nature and use of texts, the ideological implications of point-of-view for the production of educational texts, the way texts change as the students mature, and the implications of new information technologies for the development of literacy. Its study of the answers that practitioners of literacy education have found in their work contributes significantly to our understanding of the future and meaning of literacy education.

Over the past century, the explosive growth of scientific, technical, and cultural disciplines has profoundly affected our daily lives. However, processes of enculturation in sites such as graduate education that have helped to form these disciplines have received very limited research attention. In those sites, graduate students write diverse documents, including course papers, departmental examinations, theses and dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, and disciplinary publications. Thus, writing is one of the central domains of enculturation--an activity through which graduate students and professors display and negotiate disciplinary knowledge, genres, identities, and institutional contexts. This volume explores this intersection of writing and disciplinary enculturation through a series of ethnographic case studies. These case studies provide the most thorough descriptions available today of the lived experience of graduate seminars, combining analysis of classroom talk, students' texts and professor's written responses, institutional contexts, students' representations of their writing and its contexts, and professors' representations of their tasks and their students. Given the complexities that the ethnographic data displayed, the author found that conventional notions of writing as a process of transcription and of disciplines as unified discourse communities were inadequate. As such, this book also offers an in-depth exploration of sociohistoric theory in relation to writing and disciplinary enculturation. Specific case studies introduce, apply, and further elaborate notions of: * writing as literate activity, * authorship as mediated by other people and artifacts, * classroom tasks as speech genres, * enculturation as the interplay of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, and * disciplinarity as a deeply heterogeneous, laminated, and dialogic process. This blend of research and theory should be of interest to scholars and students in such fields as writing studies, rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, applied linguistics, English for academic purposes, science and technology studies, higher education, and the ethnography of communication.

"Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures" is a cross-over volume in the literature between first and second language/literacy. This anthology of articles brings together different voices from a range of publications and fields and unites them in pursuit of an understanding of how academic ways of knowing are acquired. The editors preface the collection of readings with a conceptual framework that reconsiders the current debate about the nature of academic literacies. In this volume, the term "academic literacies" denotes multiple approaches to knowledge, including reading and writing critically.
College classrooms have become sites where a number of languages and cultures intersect. This is the case not only for students who are in the process of acquiring English, but for all learners who find themselves in an academic situation that exposes them to a new set of expectations. This book is a contribution to the effort to discover ways of supporting learning across languages and cultures--and to transform views about what it means to teach and learn, to read and write, and to think and know.
Unique to this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of writers as well as those of teachers and researchers. Furthermore, the contributors reveal their own struggles and accomplishments as they themselves have attempted to negotiate academic literacies. The chronological ordering of articles provides a historical perspective, demonstrating ways in which issues related to teaching and learning across cultures have been addressed over time. The readings have consistency in terms of quality, depth, and passion; they raise important philosophical questions even as they consider practical classroom applications. The editors provide a series of questions that enable the reader to engage in a generative and exciting process of reflection and inquiry. This book is both a reference for teachers who work or plan to work with diverse learners, and a text for graduate-level courses, primarily in bilingual and ESL studies, composition studies, English education, and literacy studies.

This edited volume grew out of a conference that brought together beginning reading experts from the fields of education and the psychology of reading and reading disabilities so that they could present and discuss their research findings and theories about how children learn to read words, instructional contexts that facilitate this learning, background experiences prior to formal schooling that contribute, and sources of difficulty in disabled readers. The chapters bring a variety of perspectives to bear on a single cluster of problems involving the acquisition of word reading ability. It is the editors' keen hope that the insights and findings of the research reported here will influence and become incorporated into the development of practicable, classroom-based instructional programs that succeed in improving children's ability to become skilled readers. Furthermore, they hope that these insights and findings will become incorporated into the working knowledge that teachers apply when they teach their students to read, and into further research on reading acquisition.

This edited volume grew out of a conference that brought together beginning reading experts from the fields of education and the psychology of reading and reading disabilities so that they could present and discuss their research findings and theories about how children learn to read words, instructional contexts that facilitate this learning, background experiences prior to formal schooling that contribute, and sources of difficulty in disabled readers. The chapters bring a variety of perspectives to bear on a single cluster of problems involving the acquisition of word reading ability. It is the editors' keen hope that the insights and findings of the research reported here will influence and become incorporated into the development of practicable, classroom-based instructional programs that succeed in improving children's ability to become skilled readers. Furthermore, they hope that these insights and findings will become incorporated into the working knowledge that teachers apply when they teach their students to read, and into further research on reading acquisition.

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.

In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

In this volume, Jocelyn Small argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organise how meaning is stored and memory.
Wax Tablets of the Mind explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. Jocelyn Small examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203441605

This distinctive cross-linguistic examination of spelling examines the cognitive processes that underlie spelling and the process of learning how to spell. The chapters report and summarize recent research in English, German, Hebrew, and French. Framing the specific research on spelling are chapters that place spelling in braod theoretical perspectives provided by cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistic, and writing system-linguistic frameworks. Of special interest is the focus on two major interrelated issues: how spelling is acquired and the relationship between reading and spelling. An important dimension of the book is the interweaving of these basic questions about the nature of spelling with practical questions about how children learn to spell in classrooms. A motivating factor in this work was to demonstrate that spelling research has become a central challenging topic in the study of cognitive processes, rather than an isolated skill learned in school. It thus brings together schooling and learning issues with modern cognitive research in a unique way. testing, children writing strings of letters as a teacher pronounces words ever so clearly. In parts of the United States it can also bring an image of specialized wizardry and school room competition, the "spelling bee." And for countless adults who confess with self-deprecation to being "terrible spellers," it is a reminder of a mysterious but minor affliction that the fates have visited on them. Beneath these popular images, spelling is a human literacy ability that reflects language and nonlanguage cognitive processes. This collection of papers presents a sample of contemporary research across different languages that addresses this ability. To understand spelling as an interesting scientific problem, there are several important perspectives. First, spelling is the use of conventionalized writing systems that encode languages. A second asks how children learn to spell. Finally, from a literacy point of view, another asks the extent to which spelling and reading are related. In collecting some of the interesting research on spelling, the editors have adopted each of these perspectives. Many of the papers themselves reflect more than one perspective, and the reader will find important observations about orthographies, the relationship between spelling and reading, and issues of learning and teaching throughout the collection.

The chapters in this volume are based on presentations made at a recent conference on Cognitive and Linguistic Foundations of Reading Acquisition: Implications for Intervention Research. This was the third in a series of meetings on the subject of brain development, language acquisition, reading, and dyslexia, with the embracing title of The Extraordinary Brain. The researchers who participated have made contributions to the theoretical and empirical understanding of how children learn to read. They were asked to address not only what they have learned from their research, but also to discuss unsolved problems. This dialogue prompted numerous questions of both a theoretical and applied nature, generated heated debate, and fuelled optimism about the important gains that have been made in the scientific understanding of the reading process, especially of the critical role played by phonological abilities.

The chapters in this volume are based on presentations made at a recent conference on cognitive and linguistic foundations of reading acquisition. The researchers who participated have all made contributions to the theoretical and empirical understanding of how children learn to read. They were asked to address not only what they have learned from their research, but also to discuss unsolved problems. This dialogue prompted numerous questions of both a theoretical and applied nature, generated heated debate, and fueled optimism about the important gains that have been made in the scientific understanding of the reading process, especially of the critical role played by phonological abilities.

This book explores the gradual evolution of Adult literacy policy from the 1970s using philosophical, sociological and economic frames of reference from a range of perspectives to highlight how priorities have changed. It also offers an alternative curriculum; a transformative model that presents a more socially just different value position.

Presents research into the differences in boy's and girl's experiences of the reading and writing curriculum at home and in school. The book is presented in three sections: an outline of the theoretical debates on gender difference and academic achievement; a description of the research into these issues conducted by the author; and an analysis of the author's findings. In discussing the outcome of her research, the author aims to highlight further areas for more detailed study and makes recommendations for the development of literacy policies, which cross curriculum boundaries in schools.

Presents research into the differences in boy's and girl's experiences of the reading and writing curriculum at home and in school. The book is presented in three sections: an outline of the theoretical debates on gender difference and academic achievement; a description of the research into these issues conducted by the author; and an analysis of the author's findings. In discussing the outcome of her research, the author aims to highlight further areas for more detailed study and makes recommendations for the development of literacy policies, which cross curriculum boundaries in schools.

This volume offers concrete answers to the question of how we can use imagery to enrich the teaching of reading and writing. The chapters are organized according to two guiding principles. First, each addresses specific aspects of the inextricable integration of imagery and language in the teaching of reading and writing. Imagery is not privileged over language; the fusion of the two is emphasized. Second, each focuses on a particular kind of imagery--mental, graphic, or verbal--describing teaching/learning strategies based on the deployment of that kind of imagery in the classroom.
There is currently a renewed acknowledgment of the importance of imagery in meaning. The rapid spread of the World Wide Web, computer interfacing, and virtual reality further highlights the need to attend to the influence of imagery in a networked world. In response to these shifts in scholarly and cultural perspectives, NCTE has established a committee on visual literacy, and an emphasis on visual literacy has been incorporated into the IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts. This book contributes significantly toward filling the need for explicit and specific theory-based methods teachers can use to integrate imagery into their pedagogy. Accessible and lively chapters include classroom activities and student-generated examples. "Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom" is an excellent text for preservice and in-service pedagogy courses and an important resource for practicing teachers, researchers, and professionals in the field.