Font Changes Research Articles

Курсив как средство актуализации высказывания в поэзии М. Цветаевой

The purpose of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the functioning of italics as a means of actualizing statements in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva. Marina Tsvetaeva is one of the few poets who widely use italics in their literary practice. The selection of the most significant word in terms of meaning is found not only in the poet's poems, but also in her artistic and epistolary prose. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in M. Tsvetaeva's poetry, italics are studied from the standpoint of the actual division of the sentence. Despite the fact that the graphical means of M. Tsvetaeva was described in the aspect of actual division, the object of analysis was her original punctuation system, not italics. It is proved for the first time that italics, emphasizing the semantic and intonation center of an utterance, acts as a distinctive element in the system of actual division of a poetic text devoid of specific means of expressing actual division - word order and intonation. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed for the first time that the font change is used by M. Tsvetaeva's poetic text is used not only to highlight an informatively important word, but also as a way of conveying a certain intonation, and as a means with an expressive stylistic function.

The Implementation of “wordwall” web-based games as instructional media to improve Arabic vocabulary mastery of 8th grade students at SMP Nurul Huda Modung

In digital era, learning is not enough just to be carried out with conventional media. Today's students are close to various applications and websites, so it is necessary to apply them in the learning process. One of the innovative instructional media today is an educational web-based game named “Wordwall”. This application is a learning web-based game in which there are many types of games that students can play.
 This study aims to find out how to learn Arabic vocabulary using the web-based game "Wordwall" and what are the advantages and disadvantages of "Wordwall" in learning Arabic vocabulary for eighth graders at Nurul Huda Junior High School. Modung District, Bangkalan Region.
 The methodology in this research is descriptive qualitative, to describe the conditions of the research subjects and reveal the facts in the field. This research took place at Nurul Huda Junior High School Modung, Bangkalan Region, specifically eighth graders. The method of data collection was by interview, observation and documentation.
 As the results, this educational game brings many advantages, and disadvantages as well. The advantages are: the students can study enthusiastically and happily, because they can play and learn a lot of new vocabulary at the same time. This web-based game is also flexible; it can be used by students of any level. On the other hand, there are also disadvantages of “Wordwall”. Among them are: for basic users, there are only 5 game templates. If you want more, users have to pay 54,000 rupiah per month. The drawback of a free account is that sometimes the font changes suddenly and sometimes errors occur. Besides those things, learning takes a very long time online, and it requires a lot of internet quota.

Tamil OCR Conversion from Digital Writing Pad Recognition Accuracy Improves through Modified Deep Learning Architectures

Digital handwritten recognition is an emerging field in optical character recognition (OCR). A digital writing pad replaces manual writing. In digital writing, the alphabet changes in font and shape. During OCR recognition, covert text file errors occur due to digital pen pressure and digital pen position on the digital pad by the writer. The shape changes in the alphabet lead to an error during the conversion of OCR to text. The above problem arises in Tamil, Chinese, Arabic, and Telugu, where the alphabet consists of bends, curves, and rings. OCR‐to‐text conversion for the Tamil language has more word errors due to angles and curves in the alphabet, which need to be converted accurately. This paper proposes ResNet two‐stage bottleneck architecture (RTSBA) for Tamil language‐based text recognition written on a digital writing pad. In the proposed RTSBA, two separate stages of neural networks reduce the complexity of the Tamil alphabet recognition problem. In the initial stage, the number of inputs and variables is reduced. In the final stage, time and computation complexity are reduced. The proposed algorithm has been compared with traditional algorithms such as long short‐term memory, Inception‐v3, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and a two‐channel and two‐stream transformer. Proposed methods, such as RTSBA applied in the digital writing pad‐handwritten and HP lab datasets, achieved an accuracy of 98.7% and 97.1%, respectively.

TextDCT: Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection via Discrete Cosine Transform Mask

Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection is a challenging task due to the variety of text changes in font, size, color, and orientation. Most existing regression based methods resort to regress the masks or contour points of text regions to model the text instances. However, regressing the complete masks requires high training complexity, and contour points are not sufficient to capture the details of highly curved texts. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a novel light-weight anchor-free text detection framework called TextDCT, which adopts the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to encode the text masks as compact vectors. Further, considering the imbalanced number of training samples among pyramid layers, we only employ a single-level head for top-down prediction. To model the multi-scale texts in a single-level head, we introduce a novel positive sampling strategy by treating the shrunk text region as positive samples, and design a feature awareness module (FAM) for spatial-awareness and scale-awareness by fusing rich contextual information and focusing on more significant features. Moreover, we propose a segmented non-maximum suppression (S-NMS) method that can filter low-quality mask regressions. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate our TextDCT obtains competitive performance on both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, TextDCT achieves F-measure of 85.1 at 17.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 84.9 at 15.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.

Review of studies on the disfluency effect: Can a font change improve memorization and educational outcomes?

This review article is devoted to the disfluency effect, which is observed as an improvement in the memorization of information and subsequent educational results due to reduced processing fluency. According to the basic explanation of the disfluency effect, if information is written illegibly, the learner senses complexity, or disfluency, which leads to a deeper processing of information. Traditionally, the disfluency effect is considered from the perspective of Bjork’s desirable difficulties approach and Sweller’s cognitive load theory. In this article, we pay attention to these concepts and also discuss the main studies and meta-analyses devoted to the effect. It is worth noting that the existence of the disfluency effect is not seen as indisputable and raises doubts among the authors of the review and other colleagues. As indicated, a significant number of studies do not detect the effect; for this reason, possible moderators influencing its manifestation are also considered. A separate section of the review is devoted to research of the Sans Forgetica font. The font was specially created to be disfluent, and its developers proceeded from the assumption that the disfluency effect really exists. This review article is addressed to a wide range of readers, and it may be of interest to both specialists in the field of metacognition and for pedagogical practitioners.

The Commonplacing of Professional Plays Revisited: Print, Theater, and Early Modern Institutional Exchange

In early 1600, William Holme would have seemed unlikely to be the stationer who would soon transform the publication of early modern drama. Over the course of a ten-year career, through 1599, he had sold just thirteen titles, none of which he reprinted and none of which was a play. But that would soon change. On April 8, 1600, Holme entered Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour in the Stationers’ Register, and published the first edition shortly thereafter.1 This playbook changed the way in which the book trade printed and sold early modern drama, and not only because the claim on its title page that it contained “more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted” was unprecedented among the era’s professional vernacular playbooks.2Every Man Out also inaugurated the practice of publishing professional vernacular drama with printed commonplace markers, the full-line font change or marginal commas (sometimes inverted) used to signal aphoristic, extractable wisdom. Prior to 1600, commonplace markers had appeared in translations of classical and French drama and in vernacular nonprofessional plays and nondramatic literature. But no professional vernacular playbook featured printed commonplace markers until Every Man Out’s first quarto. It was thus Holme who published what was, in the spring of 1600, one of early modern London’s most innovative playbooks.

Corrigendum: Visualizing uncertainty for non-expert end users: The challenge of the deterministic construal error

Users: The Challenge of the Deterministic Construal Error.Front. Comput. Sci. 2:590232. doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2020.590232 In the published article, there was an error in Figure 1b and Figure 1f as published. The definition in Figure 1b read "There is an 80% chance that the daytime high will be equal to or greater than 44F and equal to or less than or equal to 38F." The definition was partly in error and should have read, "80% chance that the daytime high will be between 44F and 38F." The nighttime low temperature bar was colored yellow. It should have been blue.The definition in Figure 1f was a frequency version reading, "On 8 out of 10 days like this, the observed temperature will fall between these two values". It should have been a probabilistic version, "80% chance that the daytime high will be between 44F and 38F" to align to the other probabilistic versions used in this figure.In addition, we added a Note to the caption to inform readers that small changes in font and figure sizes were made to the versions published here to conform to journal requirements.The corrected Figure 1 and its caption [Figure 1. Predictive intervals, each accompanied by a key (shown in a) describing "41°F" as the "best forecast." Note: Font and figure sizes are slightly smaller than they were in the original experiments to conform to journal requirements] appear below.

CHESS NOTATION IN A POLYCODE TEXT (BASED ON THE GERMAN LANGUAGE)

Chess literature is a type of specialized literature with its own metalanguage and tradition of presenting material. The study focuses on the structure of works by Z.Tarrasch and A.Nimzowitsch, which can be viewed as multimodal polycode texts, combining natural language with chess notation, a symbolic system used to record the moves of a chess game. In addition to notation, symbols for evaluating moves play an important role in the texts in question, as well as verbal commentaries explaining what is happening on the board and diagrams visualizing the position on the board at a certain moment in the game. If a fragment of a chess game is presented, the diagram serves as an indication of the initial arrangement of pieces. Thus, the subsequent symbolic notation of moves becomes meaningful only in connection with the diagram. In other cases, the diagrams focus the reader’s attention on the key points of a game. In the digital world, new means for presenting chess games and comments are used. In the e-versions of the books in question, the reader can play the moves of a game on a digital board. At the same time, the structure of the source text undergoes changes: it is divided into blocks, the elements of the notation are presented as hyperlinks, font changes are used, and structural elements are added. In some cases, the specifics of the text requires its additional adaptation to the electronic format.

The One Thing You’d Save by Linda Sue Park

Reviewed by: The One Thing You’d Save by Linda Sue Park Deborah Stevenson, Editor The One Thing You’d Save by Linda Sue Park; illustrated by Robert Sae-Heng “Imagine that your home is on fire. You’re allowed to save one thing./ Your family and pets are safe, so don’t worry about them./ Your Most Important Thing. Any size. A grand piano? Fine.” So begins this assignment by teacher Ms. Chang, who sets her students thinking about what matters to them most and what they’d hate most to lose. Newbery Medal–winner Linda Sue Park puts a new spin on the class assignment genre by making this an in-class discussion (though one requiring out-of-class thought) rather than a written task, and by making it a collection of unrhymed verse written in Korean sijo format, usually in three-lined stanzas. Chat freely flows as kids start with the obvious (“MY PHONE!”) and predictably get stumped (“Oh man, I hate this, I’m never gonna be able to decide”). Soon the discussion expands to things that have emotional importance—the sweater knitted by a long-gone grandmother, the signed program from a ball game, even the saved locks of a brother who died soon after birth, and finally even Ms. Chang gets in on the action, deciding that she wouldn’t need her collection of grade books to remember her unforgettable class. Park refers to the narrative as a collection of poems, but, though font changes differentiate teacher from students, the verses flow together as an airily formatted, conversational and cohesive story. While there’s no systematic identification of the narrators, close reading and the occasional dropped name reveal some dynamics in friendship—a key moment at a Mets game figuring differently in two kids’ answers—and in the classroom itself, as kids build on one another’s answers, one student worries about a response that seems frivolous after another’s particularly moving statement, and a young collector, who keeps expanding his answer to some pushback, eventually gets some respect for his possessions. The responses not spoken out loud are as important as those that are, such as the kid who wouldn’t save anything because the “place is a total dump. . . . Be glad to see it burn down,” or the student who’s survived a real fire (“If there really is a fire/the only thing you worry about saving is your own sorry skin”). Throughout, there’s deft management of the emotional tempo, with respect for the personal meaning of sneakers as well as the necessity of Mom’s insulin, and the insightful choices bring the narrative quickly from interesting thought experiment to keen awareness of how things can represent love and connection and identity. This is a combination of piquant premise and accessible, engaging text, resulting in an unexpected hi-lo title that will invite both reluctant and enthusiastic literati to reconsider their possessions. It also cries out to be a classroom read or [End Page 287] even readaloud or readers theater, prompting youngsters to embark on their own discussion. Sae-Heng’s interspersed black and white digital scenes and spot art have a sketchy, hand-drawn look, recalling Brian Karas or Maira Kalman in their robust, naïve draftsmanship but adding a moody shadowed take all their own. Park closes with an explanation of the sijo form and her variations, noting that “using old forms in new ways is how poetry continually renews itself, and the world.” (See p. 310 for publication information.) Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Експресивність мови Івана Огієнка (на матеріалі праці «Українська церква за Богдана Хмельницького. 1647-1657»)

The article raises the problem of expressiveness of the language of Ivan Ohiіenko’s work «Ukrainian Church under Bohdan Khmelnytsky. 1647-1657». Attention is focused on the fact that the author’s use of expressive means gives the text signs of popular sci-ence substyle. The role of evaluative vocabulary with positive and negative semantics as an expressive means, which indirectly but clearly represents the author’s attitude to the depicted, is determined. The expressiveness of the language of the studied text is enhanced by detailed metaphors, which are not very frequent, but quite expressive.The means of expressive syntax are analyzed: rhetorical questions, interrogative-corresponding complexes, exclamatory sentences – which promote semantic con-densation and logical expression of thought. Amplifi cation of interrogative sentences enhances the expressiveness of popular science text, thereby emotionally aff ecting the reader. Interrogative-answering complexes perform three functions in the text: the function of imitating dialogue, the function of problem statement and the function of defi nition. It is noted that exclamatory sentences not only convey the author’s emo-tions, but are also a means of expressiveness (enhanced expressiveness).The expressive load of constructions with direct speech and quotations is deter-mined: the use of these structures models an imaginary dialogue-discussion or is a means of argumentation. Inclusions, as a kind of foreign language, expand the subjec-tive plan of the text and can convey diff erent authorial assessment.It is noted that the expressiveness of the text is enhanced by such a graphic means as words, phrases highlighted by font. The change of font and line density of graph-emes refl ects the change of intonation and logical emphasis or contains the author’s point of view, draws attention to the words highlighted by line density.The opinion is substantiated that expressive means are not only marked by en-hanced expressiveness, but also have infl uential qualities. The special purpose of ex-pressive constructions is not only to convey to the addressee this or that information, but also to draw his attention to it.

Individual Differences in Font Preference & Effectiveness as Applied to Interlude Reading in the Digital Age

In the age of pervasive reading on digital devices, incredible opportunities for customized interfaces abound. We consider how personalizing body text font can improve reading outcomes for adult readers. We present results of large-scale Interlude Reading experiments run on 386 crowdsourced participants, whereby we tested 16 body text fonts and measured impacts on font preference and reading speed. We define “Interlude Reading,” nestled between glanceable and long-form reading, as the form of reading that occurs in short interludes and is common in the mobile context. Our studies controlled for participants’ interest and familiarity with reading passages, familiarity with font families, and font size - via a perceptually-based font size normalization technique. While past work has considered how these factors affect reading in isolation, we present the first study that combines these factors under a single experimental methodology. First, our results show that normalizing a font’s size affects reading speed and font preferences. Second, familiarity with a font predicts neither preference nor effectiveness of a font. Third, people do not know what is good for them: despite 80% of people believing their most preferred font would be their most effective for reading, this was only true 18% of the time. Fourth, and most surprisingly, a simple change in font yielded a reading speed gain of 38 words per minute on average, and 93 WPM for our top quartile of participants (equivalent to eight pages an hour) while comprehension remained similarly high. With these results, we put forward (1) a methodology for running large-scale controlled reading studies, (2) a computational toolkit of crowdsourcing experiments, and (3) a list of concrete recommendations about favorable and effective fonts, and font normalization strategies. Moreover, the potential impacts on individual reading efficacy highlighted here demonstrate a need to further exploit the personalization of text formats.

Functionally Separable Font-invariant and Font-sensitive Neural Populations in Occipitotemporal Cortex.

Reading relies on the rapid visual recognition of words viewed in a wide variety of fonts. We used fMRI to identify neural populations showing reduced fMRI responses to repeated words displayed in different fonts ("font-invariant" repetition suppression). We also identified neural populations showing greater fMRI responses to words repeated in a changing font as compared with words repeated in the same font ("font-sensitive" release from repetition suppression). We observed font-invariant repetition suppression in two anatomically distinct regions of the left occipitotemporal cortex (OT), a "visual word form area" in mid-fusiform cortex, and a more posterior region in the middle occipital gyrus. In contrast, bilateral shape-selective lateral occipital cortex and posterior fusiform showed considerable sensitivity to font changes during the viewing of repeated words. Although the visual word form area and the left middle occipital gyrus showed some evidence of font sensitivity, both regions showed a relatively greater degree of font invariance than font sensitivity. Our results show that the neural mechanisms in the left OT involved in font-invariant word recognition are anatomically distinct from those sensitive to font-related shape changes. We conclude that font-invariant representation of visual word form is instantiated at multiple levels by anatomically distinct neural mechanisms within the left OT.

How task demands influence scanpath similarity in a sequential number-search task

More and more researchers are considering the omnibus eye movement sequence—the scanpath—in their studies of visual and cognitive processing (e.g. Hayes, Petrov, & Sederberg, 2011; Madsen, Larson, Loschky, & Rebello, 2012; Ni et al., 2011; von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2011). However, it remains unclear how recent methods for comparing scanpaths perform in experiments producing variable scanpaths, and whether these methods supplement more traditional analyses of individual oculomotor statistics. We address this problem for MultiMatch (Jarodzka et al., 2010; Dewhurst et al., 2012), evaluating its performance with a visual search-like task in which participants must fixate a series of target numbers in a prescribed order. This task should produce predictable sequences of fixations and thus provide a testing ground for scanpath measures. Task difficulty was manipulated by making the targets more or less visible through changes in font and the presence of distractors or visual noise. These changes in task demands led to slower search and more fixations. Importantly, they also resulted in a reduction in the between-subjects scanpath similarity, demonstrating that participants’ gaze patterns became more heterogenous in terms of saccade length and angle, and fixation position. This implies a divergent strategy or random component to eye-movement behaviour which increases as the task becomes more difficult. Interestingly, the duration of fixations along aligned vectors showed the opposite pattern, becoming more similar between observers in 2 of the 3 difficulty manipulations. This provides important information for vision scientists who may wish to use scanpath metrics to quantify variations in gaze across a spectrum of perceptual and cognitive tasks.

일반 언어학의 한자에 대한 이해와 문제점

In the introductory books on linguistics, containing general explanations on the basic knowledge of the overall research fields in general linguistics, the selection of the contents to include as basic knowledge of linguistics and the accuracy of its description are of the foremost importance. Therefore, this paper analyses the contents defining the Chinese characters in introductory linguistic books written and/or compiled by Korean linguists since 1990 to discuss what contents are essential to include as basic knowledge of the Chinese character system. Then, based on the discussion, it examines issues associated with the descriptions of the explained contents, focusing on differences from the general views held in Chinese linguistics and graphonomy. The findings of this paper on these two points may be summarized as follows:BR The contents related to Chinese characters in introductory linguistic books can be categorized into seven aspects: origin, types of writing system, font change, the formation principles of Chinese characters (liushu), characteristics, number of characters and propagation. In view of the definitions provided for Chinese characters in Korean dictionaries and the Chinese characters described in Modern Chinese (現代漢語), these seven aspects are essentials to be included in the description of the basic knowledge about Chinese characters. In addition, the content of the modern simplified Chinese should be included.BR The ‘types of writing system’ and ‘liushu’ display variances in different introductory books of linguistics, or differ from the general views held in Chinese graphonomy. In this paper, the two issues of (1) ‘classification of the types of writing system of Chinese characters by stages’ and (2) ‘explanation of the concepts of jiajie (假借) and zhuanzhu (轉注) among the six Chinese character formation principles(liushu)’ are examined based on the general views in Chinese graphonomy. In regards to (1), this paper points out the invalidity of classification by stages in contrast to the necessity of typal classification according to the classification criteria. In regards to (2), this paper clarifies the concept of ‘jiajie’ and what introductory books of linguistics have failed to provide correct explanation on it. Also, this paper points out erroneous explanations of zhuanzhu as ‘extension of meaning’ by introductory linguistic books, suggesting exclusion of zhuanzhu in the explanations of liushu for the ambiguity of concept.BR The purpose of this paper is not to point out any fallacy in the explanation but to address the importance of basic knowledge in explaining the Chinese characters, an ideography, and to extend the discussion. It is argued that detailed contents of each aspect of the basic knowledge of Chinese character system be discussed further and a standardized system established regarding the concepts of the terms and basic knowledge of the Chinese graphonomy which can be universally applied to general linguistics and graphonomy.BR

Implementation of Font Change Application for SNS by Image Selection

This paper proposes a new function, which changes fonts by selecting visual expressions of emotions. We have used different fonts for emotional expressions when creating documents. We know that emotional expressiveness can be improved spectacularly by using different fonts. Therefore, we developed a front-end application with a font adjustment function for SNS, premised on using plain texts. If the user selects an illustration of a certain emotion that he or she wants to add to the texts, the “font” of the text will be changed into the one that fits the selected emotion. Normally, the images are selected by typing characters. However, this application can change the characters of the texts based on the selected images and realize more intuitive character expression. Today, when creating some documents, considering fonts is a usual practice. It is clear that fonts give texts emotional meanings. By using this application, the emotional meaning provided by the font can be added to the characters. In short, the characters become the texts that can reach another person more accurately. It is possible to express a wide variety of emotions, and more smooth communication by texts can be expected. We propose the app that the user can attach their emotion to the text by font change function. This app will be expected to give us smooth communication by texts.

More than just beliefs: Experience and beliefs jointly contribute to volume effects on metacognitive judgments.

Experience-based cues, such as perceptual fluency, have long been thought to influence metacognitive judgments (Kelley & Jacoby, 1996; Koriat, 1997). Studies found that manipulations of perceptual fluency via changes in font and volume alter Judgments of Learning (JOLs) without influencing memory performance (Rhodes & Castel, 2008, 2009). Nonetheless, recent research (Mueller, Tauber, & Dunlosky, 2013; Mueller, Dunlosky, Tauber, & Rhodes, 2014, 2016) has challenged the notion that experience-based cues such as fluency are the primary basis for item-level JOLs, arguing instead that preexisting beliefs about these manipulations are responsible for these effects. For the first time, we compared global metacognitive judgments to item-level JOLs made during study to independently assess the contribution of beliefs and experience to volume-effects on JOLs. In 3 experiments, we found evidence for strong beliefs about volume-effects on memory, both before and after a study-test phase. However, these beliefs either did not account for the volume effect on JOLs (Experiment 3) or only partially accounted for the volume effect on JOLs (Experiments 1 and 2). Further, in Experiments 2 and 3 global performance estimates (before and after study) did not differ with respect to the volume dose whereas item-level JOLs generally varied with dose strength. Taken together, our findings suggest that both beliefs and experience-based cues contribute independently to the effects of volume on item-level JOLs, but that beliefs alone cannot fully account for the effects of volume on item-level JOLs. (PsycINFO Database Record

Have Sword, Will Travel by Garth Nix

Reviewed by: Have Sword, Will Travel by Garth Nix Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Nix, Garth Have Sword, Will Travel; by Garth Nix and Sean Williams. Scholastic, 2017 [288p] ISBN 978-0-545-25902-6 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 Out hunting one afternoon, young Odo finds a sword in the muck, a sword that promptly starts talking, dubs Odo a knight, and demands to be taken on a heroic quest. Homebody Odo is none too keen on this adventuring, but his friend Eleanor is stoked—however, she's a little disappointed when the sword merely names her a squire, striking a blow to her dreams of becoming a great knight like her mother. Their village does need saving, though, as the river is drying up and rumors of an evil force in the north are spreading. Off the two kids go along with the loquacious sword to put things to right, meeting greedy mole-like creatures, an ethereal monk, another talking sword, and a group of bandits along the way. It all makes for a entertaining reading adventure, with the action starting early and never ceasing and sardonic interjections provided up by the sword (whose voice is denoted by a font change); Odo and Eleanor make the perfect heroes, clever, brave, and occasionally bumbling. The ending leans a bit dark as it sees them matured by some of the violence they've seen, but they remain steadfast in their responsibilities as knights (yes, Eleanor finally earns the title) and set off to defeat an evil king in the book's final pages, so a sequel seems likely. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Feasts of Fury by Eric Colossal (review)

Reviewed by: Feasts of Fury by Eric Colossal April Spisak Colossal, Eric Feasts of Fury; written and illus. by Eric Colossal. Amulet, 2016 [128p] (Rutabaga the Adventure Chef) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-1658-4 $16.95 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-1659-1 $9.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5 Rutabaga (a human) and Pot (an animate pot) return for another round of ridiculous adventures following their first outing in Rutabaga the Adventure Chef (BCCB 5/15) and travel the seemingly endless land of Colossal’s creation, seeking new ingredients and hoping to share amazing food with all they meet. Pot is absurdly personable, given that he is a cauldron with no facial features, and he gets more of a role in this graphic novel than in the earlier one, sharing adventures while also serving as cooking vessel, beloved companion, and hero. Rutabaga, all bluster and enthusiasm, is equally endearing, resulting in a duo one can’t help but root for, especially when they face dangerous gubblins who can’t be defeated by brawn but might be outmatched when it comes to brains. Lively illustrations (which will be in color in the bound book), liberal use of exclamation points and font changes to emphasize exaggerated points, and manga-style facial expressions keep things pitched at high drama, as Rutabaga seems to react to deathly encounters and minor disappointments with equal amounts of surprise. As with the earlier novel, there are several actual recipes throughout that foodie kids can try, with three specifically featured at the end that would be appropriate even for young cooks. While there isn’t a lot new added to this second encounter, fans will still enjoy the chance visit again with Ru and Pot. [End Page 409] Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Enhancing the Early Reading Skills: Examining the Print Features of Preschool Children’s Book

The purpose of this study is to examine the uses of print features in preschool children’s books in the US and Turkey, in order to helping adults to understand print features and supporting children’s print awareness. In this context, two hundred children’s books was randomly selected from the US and Turkey. Document analysis was used for examining the children’s books. For the analysis of how to use print features, this study used coding systems adapted from McCarier, Pinnel, and Fountas (2000) and Zucker, Ward, and Justice (2009). After identifying children’s book literature as concept books, theme collections, rhythm’s books of language, and story books, we evaluated print features of books according to six features: labeling/environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts in the coding system. Findings of this study showed that examining children’s books in the US contains more print features than examining children’s books in Turkey.

The effects of textual enhancement type on L2 form recognition and reading comprehension in Spanish

Previous research investigating the effectiveness of textual enhancement as a tool to draw adult second language (L2) learners’ attention to the targeted linguistic form has consistently produced mixed results. This article examines how L2 form recognition and reading comprehension are affected by different types of textual enhancement. Participants ( n = 109) in the experimental group read a passage that contained one type of textual enhancement (underline, bold, italics, change in font size, use of capital letters or change of font) on the target structure (Spanish present and preterit tense) morphemes. A control group ( n = 16) read the same passage without any type of enhancement. To measure L2 form recognition, all groups completed pre- and post-tests consisting of an L2 to first language (L1) translation task. To assess the effects of enhancement type on L2 reading comprehension, the participants completed a 40 item multiple choice test with questions focusing on form or meaning from the reading. Results for the present study revealed that one type of textual enhancement was better than others with regard to facilitating L2 form recognition, and that comprehension was not hindered by enhancement, regardless of enhancement type.