Contextual Reading Research Articles

Symmetries and asymmetries in children's peer-group reading discussions

This paper reports a research project exploring children's peer interactions in group reading discussions where a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This context reflects a reality of classroom teaching where most children in the class are completing tasks independently while the teacher is working other groups. In the study, four quartets of ten year-old children in the UK and Mexico were recorded as they discussed different texts together and this paper reports the findings from their engagement with The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. In the paper, we focus on the symmetries and asymmetries apparent in the children's peer talk to consider how they engage together to make meaning from the text they are reading. To this end we focus on two strands of analysis related to children's talk within their groups: (a) the function of utterances within their speech turns; and (b) the dynamics of the interaction, that is, the organisation of the talk into topical episodes. By considering these two strands of analysis, we are able to illuminate the nuances of a/symmetries in small-group reading contexts as we concentrate on how the children use language and action to influence the direction of, and contribute to, the discussions. The results find children authoritatively shifted the discussion forward into new topics using different means, and displayed evidence of high-level comprehension as they engaged with the ideas of each other. The two strands of analysis complemented each other as they illustrated not only the resources the children drew on to shift the movement of the discussion, but how their language enabled this movement forward. The results also highlighted differences in how the children perceived their goals and responsibilities within the task and groups.

Branje mladih leta 2009 in leta 2018 ter razlike v branju glede na spol in izobraževalni program

Reading of the youth in 2009 and 2018: differences according to gender and national study programme The article presents reading characteristics of 15-year olds, as assessed in the OECD PISA study. Since reading was the major domain of assessment in PISA 2009 and 2018 cycles, we investigated differences in the results in the following areas: reading motivation, frequency of reading specific reading materials, reading activities on-line, and the assessment of the usefulness of metacognitive reading strategies. The analysis was carried out on a PISA sample of Slovenian 15-year olds (n = 6073 in 2009; n = 6401 in 2018). Besides the differences in reading motivation and other reading factors between the two PISA cycles, we were also interested in if these factors differ according to gender and national study programme. The results of the present study show that in PISA 2018, compared to PISA 2009, Slovenian 15-year olds reported less enjoyment in reading, less time spent reading for enjoyment, they assessed the metacognitive reading strategies to summarize information as less useful, and they also reported significantly lower levels of reading newspapers, magazines and comic books. On the other hand, they reported more frequent searches for particular information on-line. Compared to boys, girls from all national education programmes reported higher levels of enjoyment in reading, they more often perceived reading as an important hobby and reported more frequent reading of fiction books. On the other hand, boys reported more frequent reading of non-fiction books. The results of the present study also showed no significant differences between boys and girls within a particular study programme in reading activities on-line. Furthermore, the majority of these activities were associated with above-average results in both PISA cycles. We see a challenge for the teaching profession in Slovenia in strengthening the interest for reading in youth, encouraging the social context of reading, empowering them with knowledge of the efficient use of different reading strategies and creating quality on-line learning materials with applicable content. Key words: PISA study, reading characteristics of youth, reading motivation, gender differences, differences in national study programmes

Characteristics and Validity of an Instrument for Assessing Motivations for Online Reading to Learn

ABSTRACTMotivation for reading is important to comprehension and has been studied extensively in offline reading contexts. However, little is known about the role of motivation in online reading, a new and increasingly important context for reading, largely because of a lack of valid and reliable instruments to estimate a student’s motivation for online reading. The authors report on the development of the Motivations for Online Reading Questionnaire (MORQ) among 1,798 seventh‐grade students in two states. Results from confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three‐factor solution for the MORQ: curiosity/value, self‐efficacy, and self‐improvement beliefs. Additionally, measurement invariance across female and male students was established. Predictive validity of the MORQ was supported by the positive and significant contribution of the MORQ to the Online Research and Comprehension Assessment, an established measure of online reading comprehension. Results help establish the MORQ as a well‐validated instrument for measuring online reading motivation. Results are discussed in relation to theory, research, and practice.

Socio-Economic Conspiracy and Ecological Devastation: A Contextual Reading of Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist

The persistent crisis in the Niger Delta, bordering on the effects of oil exploration among other socio-economic issues, left the confines of politics and found expression in literary works. Tanure Ojaide, a prolific poet and writer from the Niger Delta, and other eco-critics explore these devastating realities in their creative enterprise. This study, therefore, sets out to examine Ojaide’s conceptualization of the tensions and struggles of the Niger Delta people against forces of exploitation and oppression and the often tragic consequences of the collusion in his novel, The Activist. While adopting an experimental form of analysis – a reportorial- the novel’s message adequately structures its form and makes an explicit comment on the need for educational activism. The paper concludes that the author positions education as a major tool of liberation and a constructive way of subverting both socio-economic and environmental deprivation. This therefore goes to show The Activist as an intellectual work whose agitations offer the dais for a positive change in the Niger Delta.

“Even unto this Bitter Loving”: Unhappiness and Backward Feelings in Ruth

Abstract Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the critical attention on structures of exploitation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), I argue for the importance of feeling, especially unhappy or backward feeling, in reading Ruth. My reading also frames the biblical book in conversation with Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 lesbian novel (and source for lesbian and queer theory) The Well of Loneliness. By following unhappiness and backwardness in and around Ruth, we are able to snatch a glimpse of queer feeling, and the space of promise it opens.

Academic language and listening comprehension—Two sides of the same coin? An empirical examination of their dimensionality, relations to reading comprehension, and assessment modality.

Two widely studied language skills in relation to reading comprehension are listening comprehension skill and academic language proficiency. Although their constituent skills and theoretical accounts of how they are related to reading comprehension share a large overlap, they have been studied in separate lines of work. In this study, we investigated the dimensionality of listening comprehension and academic language proficiency tasks, their relations to reading comprehension, and the impact of assessment modality (reading vs. oral language) of academic language proficiency, using data from children in Grade 2 (N = 350). Two cohorts of children from the same schools were assessed on the same set of listening comprehension, word reading, reading comprehension, and academic language tasks. Whereas the first three constructs were assessed in identical manner across the 2 cohorts, academic language tasks were assessed in different modalities (1 cohort in a reading context and the other cohort in an oral language context). Academic language proficiency and listening comprehension skill tasks were best described as having a general oral language construct that captured common variance among all the tasks as well as having specific residual factors. Students’ average performance on academic language tasks was lower in the reading context, wherein students’ reading skill was also captured beyond the academic “language” proficiency. Across assessment modalities, it was the general oral language construct, not the specific factors, that was reliable, and consistently and most dominantly related to reading comprehension after accounting for word reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Text Complexity Classification Based on Linguistic Information: Application to Intelligent Tutoring of ESL

The goal of this work is to build a classifier that can identify text complexity within the context of teaching reading to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. To present language learners with texts that are suitable to their level of English, a set of features that can describe the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, discursive, and psychological complexity of a given text were identified. Using a corpus of 6171 texts, which had already been classified into three different levels of difficulty by ESL experts, different experiments were conducted with five machine learning algorithms. The results showed that the adopted linguistic features provide a good overall classification performance (F-Score = 0.97). A scalability evaluation was conducted to test if such a classifier could be used within real applications, where it can be, for example, plugged into a search engine or a web-scraping module. In this evaluation, the texts in the test set are not only different from those from the training set but also of different types (ESL texts vs. children reading texts). Although the overall performance of the classifier decreased significantly (F-Score = 0.65), the confusion matrix shows that most of the classification errors are between the classes two and three (the middle-level classes) and that the system has a robust performance in categorizing texts of class one and four. This behavior can be explained by the difference in classification criteria between the two corpora. Hence, the observed results confirm the usability of such a classifier within a real-world application.

Investigation of Vocabulary Learning Strategies to Identify Word Meanings for Saudi EFL Students in Reading Context

This study attempted to answer the following research questions related to the various vocabulary discovery strategies which are used by Saudi undergraduate learners to find unknown word meanings, the most and the least vocabulary discovery strategies the learners used to discover unknown word meanings, the relationship between the type of Vocabulary Learning Strategies used and the scores the learners accomplished on the vocabulary test, and effectiveness of the learner control and the teacher control strategy in enhancing learners’ ability to discover meanings of unknown words. Answering these questions of the study are expected to help language instructors determine the most feasible vocabulary learning strategies to help their students improve their vocabulary and so their language competences. Through purposive sampling, a group of 50 male students participated in this descriptive and analytic type of study. A questionnaire and a vocabulary test were used to collect data. The findings of the study revealed that in understanding a reading text, EFL Saudi students tend to figure out the meanings of unknown words, mainly by guessing word-meanings through different sub-strategies. The least used was the social interaction strategy. It was also found that students’ scores on the vocabulary test significantly correlated (positively and negatively) with the type of strategy they used. This study concluded that it is vital for teachers and textbook writers to design more activities to train students on the use of effective vocabulary learning strategies, mainly guessing through socially linked contextual clues.

Hamlet and the People “Who Know Things”

Is Shakespeare universal? Is Hamlet a “strong” text that generates the same interpretation across cultural space and time, or is it a malleable text whose meaning is contingent upon variables in the encounter between text and reader and the contexts of reading? These were the kinds of questions that my students and I addressed in several courses I taught on Shakespeare over the past four years. As one might expect, our answers differed. Here, I develop and refine the argument I made and, sometimes, made incoherently: universality, whether in a writer, a text, or in criticism “is neither natural nor self-evident.” Because part of my reason for turning to Shakespeare was my dissatisfaction with contrapuntal reading as a pedagogical strategy for cultivating a “critical understanding of imperialism” in students, I conclude that we can only achieve that goal if we deploy contrapuntal reading across the literary curriculum.

Who Reads Food Labels? Selected Predictors of Consumer Interest in Front-of-Package and Back-of-Package Labels during and after the Purchase.

The paper aims to identify selected predictors of food label use to extend our knowledge about consumer behavior related to food purchases. Two types of information were examined: front-of-package (FOP) and back-of-package (BOP), and two contexts of reading labels were distinguished: during shopping and at home. Various types of potential predictors were tested, including demographic (e.g., age, gender, household size, place of living), socioeconomic (e.g., education, professional activity, income), behavioral (e.g., purchasing certain types of products), and psychographic (e.g., importance attached to various types of information) criteria. The survey was conducted with the use of the CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interviews) methodology in a sample of 1051 Polish consumers. Quota sampling was applied based on sex, age, education, place of living (urban vs. rural), and region. Descriptive statistics, t-tests, ANOVAs, Pearson correlation coefficients, and multiple and retrograde step regressions were applied. In retrograde step regression models, only one predictor (self-rated knowledge about nutrition healthiness) turned out to be significant for all four measures of label reading. The remaining predictors were specific to selected measures of reading labels. The importance of the information about the content of fat and that about the health effects of consuming a food product were significant predictors of three types of food label use. This study confirms the necessity to investigate reading labels in fine-grained models, adapted to different types of labels and different contexts of reading. Our results show that demographic or socioeconomic variables are not significant predictors of reading food labels for a large group of Polish consumers.

Toward Relationally Engaging Confucian Texts as Contemporary Educational Resources

Normative notions that classical Chinese texts support authoritarian practices eclipse the possibility that the texts can become contemporary educational resources. Oriented by a conception of relationality, the research engages a Foucauldian approach to writing history as genealogy to argue that the political use of the so-called Confucian texts as content for imperial Chinese civil service examinations throughout much of the last two millennia situated the texts as objects and subjects of power. More specifically, the conflation of the philosophical texts with the exam process produced an extreme context enhanced by a public’s desire for success. This context shaped the conditions of textual engagement and contributed to reductive normative textual interpretations, which had broader social implications. However, if reading contexts influence textual meaning, then changes in contexts impact interpretations of these texts. This perspective suggests that educators of varied disciplines who directly engage the texts contribute to the ongoing construction of textual meanings, providing provocative frameworks to consider contemporary phenomena.

‘Daylight upon magic’: Stained Glass and the Victorian Monarchy

This article presents stained glass as an important source of material evidence for attitudes to monarchy in Victorian Britain. It argues that expressions of veneration for Victoria by different religious constituencies were not merely instinctual and affective but considered and erudite. The ways in which different Anglican constituencies in particular marked key moments in Victoria’s reign within their churches made her person and throne a symbol for their ecclesiastical visions. The article supports its argument by offering a close, contextual reading of one such memorial, Charles Eamer Kempe’s Diamond Jubilee window (1898) in St Saviour’s, Southwark. Although nominally intended as a memorial to the long dead Prince Albert, it made only oblique reference to him. Instead, the window’s patron and the church’s rector William Thompson described the four figures depicted in its lights — Pope Gregory, King Ethelbert, Stephen Langton, and William of Wykeham — as ‘illustrating the union of <i>Church and State</i>’. Its message that the national Church had always been the indivisible ally of godly monarchs since the dawn of English history was the more powerful when read against Kempe and Thompson’s broader scheme for the redecoration of the restored St Saviour’s. Together they created a series of windows which not only interwove the English monarchy with the cosmic salvation narrative of Christianity but represented the church as a benevolent and inclusive patron of eminent writers, thinkers, and philanthropists in Southwark.

Evidential remains

This article utilises the theoretical perspectives of the forensic turn to further expand our historical understandings and interpretations of the events of the Holocaust. More specifically, it applies a theory of the materialities of dead bodies to historically reconstruct and reinterpret the death march from Buchenwald to Dachau from 7 to 28 April 1945. It focuses on dead bodies as ‘evidence’, but explores how the evidential meanings of corpses along the death-march route evolved and changed during the march itself and in the aftermath of discovery by approaching American military forces. While drawing on theories of the evidential use of dead bodies, it remains firmly grounded in empirical historical research based on archival sources. The archives at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp contain eyewitness accounts and post-war trial testimony that enable a deeply contextualised ‘microhistory’ of the geography, movements, perpetrators, victims and events along this specific death march in April and May 1945. This ‘thick description’ provides the necessary context for a theoretical reading of the changing evidential meanings of dead bodies as the death march wove its way from Buchenwald to Dachau and the war and the Holocaust drew to an end.

Contextualization Models for Community College Reading and Study Strategies: An Integrative Literature Review

ABSTRACT In recent years, contextualization has emerged as a buzzword in higher education, and, in community college developmental education contexts in particular. However, it is important to note that contextualization is more than an innovation that is specific to the current developmental education reform movement, as iterations of this concept abound. In this manuscript, we provide an in-depth analysis of the current movement toward contextualization as it has evolved over many years in college reading and study strategy contexts. We begin by providing an overview of the historical background on the construct, as well as contemporary conceptualizations of what is now referred to as contextualization. Next, we describe an extensive integrative literature review on the topic of contextualization of college reading and study strategies, including the results of that review. We close with possible contributions of this review for higher education professionals designing contextualized learning environments.

Seek the shalom of the city

This article is a missiological response to the migration and homelessness challenges, especially issues of socio-economic and political marginalisation, as experienced by foreign nationals in the City of Tshwane. The most pressing question which this article seeks to investigate is: “What action can faith communities in diaspora take to contribute towards the regeneration of their host city?” Using literature study and a contextual Bible reading of Jeremiah 29:1–7 from the lenses of both trained and ordinary readers, this article encourages faith communities in diaspora to activelyparticipate in seeking the shalom and well-being of their host city by praying and working towards urban renewal.

Adjustment of Early Aged Children with Language Disorder

The purpose of this literature review is to describe the adjustment of early aged children with language disorder. Through the ProQuest and EBSCO electronic databases with publication dates between October 2009 and October 2019, 4 relevant articles were obtained. Based on the results of the analysis, it was found that early childhood with language disorder has an unfavorable adjustment which is characterized by the presence of several problems related to adjustment, namely the discovery of behavioral and learning problems, difficult temperaments and self regulation problems. Gender and mother's education level is one of the factors that can influence language development in children. Systematic instruction using feedback can be used to teach early childhood academic and social skills with language disorder in small group settings. Book reading context is found to be able to develop vocabulary. In addition, toy play was found to produce a more balanced speech ratio than reading books. Various problems related to adjustment are experienced by early aged children with language disorders. External or environmental factors are expected to provide support for children to achieve good adjustment, especially in young children who have language disorders.

Textual and reader factors in narrative empathy: An empirical reader response study using focus groups

This article contributes new insights into the interplay between textual and reader factors in experiences of narrative empathy, or empathy with characters in narrative. It adds to the rather scarce empirical evidence on the relationships between textual devices and readers’ (non-)empathetic responses to characters. This empirical study involved stylistic-narratological analysis of short stories by Eduardo Galeano and thematic analysis of focus group discussions. The study considers empathy in relation to victims and perpetrators in narratives of persecution and torture. Methodologically, the article emphasises the value of a qualitative approach to collecting and analysing readers’ responses that is half way between naturalistic and experimental orientations. The main findings, which revolve around the interaction between certain narrative techniques and readers’ moral evaluation of characters, challenge some theoretical claims from the scholarly literature about textual effects on readers’ empathy. In so doing, the article considers empathy as a highly flexible and context-dependent phenomenon, and suggests the need for a nuanced approach that accommodates the complex interaction between textual and reader factors in the reading context. The discussion spells out the broader implications of the study for stylistic research on the role of language in bringing about effects in readers and also for narrative empathy research. These implications will be of interest to scholars conducting reception studies or reader response research in the neighbouring fields of empirical stylistics, empirical narratology, and empirical literary studies.

Exploring the Effects of Globalization on Silk Weaving Tradition of Bishnupur Region in West Bengal, India

Over the years, increasing concerns among the scholars incline to see the adverse effects of globalization. One of the major reasons for this ever-increasing concern is the gradual infiltration of market-driven production system and global capitalism among different groups of people who earn their living either as wage laborers or artisans. This effect has been most profoundly noted among those whose place is on the fringe of the national economy. Another main reason is that the states are increasingly losing their capacity to govern and to regulate in this increasingly borderless world, where resourceless artisans have become the worst sufferers both in the cultural and economic frontiers. This article attempts to examine the effect that the process of globalization has made among the silk weavers of Bishnupur region in West Bengal, India. It adopts a transformational approach and uses both contextual reading and ethnographic data collected through firsthand fieldwork among the aforesaid community. The ethnography describes the messy and unquantifiable relationship between local actors and the international process.

Proverbs 31:10–31: A contextual reading

Proverbs 31:10–31: A contextual reading

A hermeneutics of scientific practices and the concept of “text”

This paper discusses a version of the hermeneutic philosophy of science. Special focus is placed on the ways of reading theoretical objects in scientific inquiry. In implementing readable technologies, this reading succeeds in contextually visualizing the theoretical objects by means of various sorts of signs. A configuration of readable technology accomplishes a further step. The configuration textualizes the contextually produced signs. Textualizing the reading of theoretical objects interlaces the meaningful articulation and objectification of scientific domains. The horizon of possibilities for textualizing is constantly shifting in the process of normal-scientific inquiry, and the shifting horizon plays the role of a hermeneutic fore-structuring of the outcomes of textualizing. The paper explores the importance of “material hermeneutics” for the contextual reading of theoretical objects. The conclusion is drawn that the hermeneutic study of the entanglement of technological artifacts with the outcomes from reading-as-textualizing requires the introduction of ontic-ontological difference.