Reading and Language Commons^™

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …

Motherhood And Sexuality In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Amanda Kane Rooks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Motherhood and Sexuality in Flaubert's Madame Bovary" Amanda Kane Rooks examines the narration of relationships in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary between Emma's role as mother and her sexuality. Rooks argues that this narrative relationship provides a space where the association between the oppressions of motherhood and women's sexuality can be better understood. Further, Rooks posits that Flaubert's narrative condemns the nineteenth-century Western predilection for constructing a relationship of mutual exclusivity between motherhood and sexuality, while it exposes socially sanctioned performances of motherhood and sexuality as allied, perverse manifestations of the same repressive ideological system.

Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Vocabulary Growth Using Nonfiction Literature And Dialogic Discussions In Preschool Classrooms, Gwen R. Marra

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The preschool years are a crucial time for children to develop vocabulary knowledge. A quality preschool environment promotes large amounts of language usage including picture book read alouds and discussions. There is growing research to support the use of nonfiction literature in preschool classrooms to promote vocabulary growth and knowledge of the world for preschool children. This research study compared vocabulary growth of preschool children using fiction and dialogic discussions versus vocabulary growth of preschool children using nonfiction and dialogic discussions following a six week study of autumn and changes that happen during this season to the environment and animals. …

Looking At The Multiple Meanings Of Numeracy, Quantitative Literacy, And Quantitative Reasoning, H. L. Vacher

Numeracy

The subject of this journal goes by a variety of names: numeracy, quantitative literacy, and quantitative reasoning. Some authors use the terms interchangeably. Others see distinctions between them. Study of psycholinguistic and ontological concepts laid out in the literature of WordNet and familiarity with the papers in this journal suggests a vocabulary matrix consisting of four rows (word senses) and three columns (word forms, namely numeracy, QL, and QR). The four word senses correspond to four sets of synonyms: {numeracy}, {numeracy, QL}, {QL, QR}, and {numeracy, QL, QR}. Each of the word forms is polysemous: “numeracy” points to the first, …

Does Voluntary Reading Matter? The Influences Of Voluntary Reading On Student Achievement, Maika J. Yeigh

Dissertations and Theses

Does voluntary reading matter? While there is much known about the benefits to children who engage in sustained silent reading, commercial reading programs implemented as a result of No Child Left Behind often displace time for children to silently read (NCLB, 2002). An increase in the amount of time children spend with a commercial reading program has meant a decrease in time provided for in-school voluntary reading during the elementary literacy block (Brenner & Hiebert, 2010). This quantitative study used the 2011 restricted-use National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data to determine whether opportunities provided to children for in-school voluntary …

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …

Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and 'Professional Competition with Death'" Debra Shostak analyzes Philip Roth's 1954 short story "The Day It Snowed" and surveys a range of his books. Shostak offers a reading of Sabbath's Theater and Everyman to explore Roth's fictional forms and his conception of storytelling, elucidates how the traumatic knowledge of death at graveside initiates the psychoanalytic process of repression, repetition, remembering, and telling, and uncovers several motifs or formal strategies that appear when Roth deploys cemetery scenes: the linear plotting toward death is often embraced within circular narrative structures; the voice of the mother, …

Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Jewish History, US-American Fictions, and 'Soul-Battering' in Roth's 'Conversion of the Jews'" Sandor Goodhart discusses Philip Roth's story in which an innocent question raised in a Hebrew school discussion in the early 1950s gets wildly out of control. It leads the student into a screaming fight with his Rabbi, which propels the child into a confrontation with his mother, which in turn leads to a second violent confrontation with the Rabbi (who ends up slapping the child), and the episode culminates in a rooftop exchange over the synagogue where the boy’s thought of escape is suddenly converted …

European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

in his article "European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy" Gustavo Sánchez-Canales discusses the significance of European literature in Philip Roth's novels. Sánchez-Canales analyses the influence of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" on Roth's The Breast and in Roth's The Professor of Desire of Anton Chekhov's tales and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and The Castle. Further, Sánchez-Canales elaborates on the impact of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and W.B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" on Roth's The Dying Animal.

Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth" Jay L. Halio discusses anti-Semitism in Philip Roth's fiction that what might be called reverse anti-Semitism: the active reaction by Jews who are subjected to anti-Semitism. This aspect of Roth's work is not often discussed: it is not the same as philo-Semitism, which takes a different form entirely. Since Roth was an admirer of Saul Bellow, Halio begins by considering reverse anti-Semitism in Bellow's early novel The Victim. In the novel the protagonist, Asa Leventhal, is accused by a character named Allbee of costing him his job …

Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Humorous Art of Ghost Writing" Paule Lévy analyses Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, the last novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman, in which Roth reassesses his favorite alter ego's itinerary while exploring the troubled relation between writing and aging. Lévy considers Exit Ghost as an ironic sequel to The Ghost Writer and posits that in the light of Derrida's theories of writing and "hauntology" the central motifs of ghosts and "spectrality" in the novel are a means for Roth to reflect anew on the ambiguous relation between autobiography and fiction. Lévy asks whether Exit Ghost should be …

Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Contribution to the Narrativization of Illness" Miriam Jaffe-Foger argues that Philipp Roth's fiction represents him as an empath, a writer who prescribes for modern medicine a dose of humanity in listening to the pain of others. Using Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, The Dying Animal, and Exit Ghost as primary source material in combination with theories from medical anthropology, Jaffe-Foger suggests that Roth is an inspiration for the field of narrative medicine. Jaffe-Foger examines the art in organizing narratives to tell these stories. Jaffe-Foger also argues against misogynist views of Roth as he represents woman's …

Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis" Emily Budick discusses Philip Roth's novel Nemesis as the culminating work of a career in which one nemesis or another has afflicted almost all of the author's protagonists. During the bulk of Roth's career, the hero's nemesis was generally, as in the ordinary, literary usage of the term, the protagonist's enemy, whether Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer or the alter-Roth in The Counterlife. In Nemesis Roth restores the word nemesis to its classical meaning: Nemesis, as the goddess of revenge and cosmic balance. The nemesis in Roth's novel, therefore, …

Comparison Of Piaac And Pisa Frameworks For Numeracy And Mathematical Literacy, Iddo Gal, David Tout

OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

This paper describes key aspects of the frameworks for the assessment of adult numeracy and mathematical literacy in PIAAC and PISA, which are OECD two flagship programs for international comparative assessment of competencies. The paper examines commonalities and differences in how the constructs of adult numeracy and mathematical literacy were assessed in PIAAC and PISA, and sketches selected challenges associated with interpretation of results from these surveys.

The Academic And Cultural Adaptation Of Chinese International Students At Umass Boston: The Struggles And Progress From The Perspectives Of Students And Professors, Pingping Chen, Theodora Chocos, Lorena Fuentes

English Faculty Publication Series

This panel will articulate the struggles and progress of Chinese international students in their learning processes at UMass Boston. Additionally, the challenges some professors have faced in teaching Chinese international students and the pedagogical practice they have used to engage these learners in their courses will be addressed.

This panel was presented as part of the 2014 8th Annual University Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Technology on May 15, 2014. The theme of the conference was "Teaching both What and How for Deep Learning at Every Level."

One Approach For The Role Of Rhyming Dictionaries In Developing Children's Language Proficiency And The Multimedia Technologies, Mimoza Priku, Josef Bushati, Ardiana Sula, Ledia Kashahu

Jandrisevits Faculty Publications

In this study it will be addressed some matters concerning children's phonological development, focusing on the development of rhyming ability for the children. Speech means pure and clearly pronunciation. For linguistic development assistance of children it is need rhyming dictionaries. They help children as to the exact pronunciation spoken words by data phonemes related their composition, as well as to encourage them to recognize new close words, but not the same with them for the pronunciation. This method helps correct pronunciation on the one hand, while on the other hand promotes vocabulary enrichment. These dictionaries play a positive role in …

Boston Writing Project, Glenn Mitchell, Peter Golden

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Boston Writing Project focuses on the core mission of improving the teaching of writing and improving the use of writing across the disciplines by offering high-quality professional development programs for educators, at all grade levels, K–16 and across the curriculum.

Community University Project For Literacy (Cupl), Carol Chandler-Rourke

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Community-University Project for Literacy (CUPL), now in its third decade of service, provides an academic structure for UMB students to provide 40 hours of service each semester as tutors at community-based learning centers while attending a credit-bearing seminar at UMass/Boston.

Providing Staff And Program Development For Boston-Area Adult Basic Education Programs, Adult Literacy Resource Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston, System For Adult Basic Education Support (Sabes), College Of Education And Human Development, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Adult Literacy Resource Institute (part of UMass Boston since 1983, and 100% grant-funded) serves as the Greater Boston Regional Support Center for SABES, the state’s System for Adult Basic Education Support. We provide staff and program development services to adult basic education programs in the Boston area, especially the approximately 40 programs in the region (most located at community-based organizations) that are funded by the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and that offer ESOL, basic literacy and numeracy, high school equivalency preparation, and other classes (including family literacy, civics education, career pathways, and college transition).

The Predictive Validity Of Oral Reading Fluency Measures On The Louisiana Educational Assessment Program For Third And Fourth Grade Students, Tracy Elkins Bennett

Doctoral Dissertations

Good, Kaminski, Simmons and Kamenui (2001) declared a national awareness of the benefits of early reading success and the negative consequences of early reading failure. One method discussed for prevention of reading failure was the implementation of screening programs employed to measure reading skills, predict success of future reading success, and inform instruction that would hopefully eliminate reading failure. In the current study, the primary research question was to investigate the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Oral Reading Fluency (DIBELS ORF) benchmark and screening program and its predictive abilities on reading comprehension achievement measured by the integrated …

English In South Asia And Pedagogical Implications, Brittany R. Ehret

Senior Honors Theses

English at present maintains a significant role as a second or foreign language in the region of South Asia as well as globally. In a discussion of this topic, it is important to explore a brief history of the expansion of English and its origins in South Asia. It is also essential to provide a background of South Asian English and its unique linguistic characteristics as well as its use in different contexts of South Asia. The perspectives of linguists and educators who are native to the region of South Asia should be included as much as possible in this …

Researching The Avant-Garde: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Bohn And Sell, Blaž Zabel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Subjectivity In 'Attār's Shaykh Of San'Ān Story In The Conference Of The Birds, Claudia Yaghoobi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Subjectivity in 'Attār’s Shaykh of San'ān Story in The Conference of the Birds" Claudia Yaghoobi discusses intersections of transgression, law, inclusion and exclusion, self and Other in Farīd al-Dīn 'Attār's (1142?-ca.1220) treatment of religion with regard to Shaykh San'ān and the Christian girl's love story in The Conference of the Birds. San'ān is an ascetic master who has never transgressed any of the Islamic laws until he embarks on a journey from Mecca to Rome after a dream only to fall in love with a Christian girl, convert to Christianity, and begin drinking wine and …

Art And Politics In Latin America: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Van Delden And Grenier, Sánchez, And Cohn, Nicole L. Sparling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intertextuality In Beckett's And Ağaoğlu's Work, Elmas Şahín

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intertextuality in Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's Work" Elmas Şahín discusses Adalet Ağaoğlu's 1973 novel Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) and Samuel Beckett's 1950 Malone Dies in terms of intertextuality. Şahín employs tenets of comparative literature in order to analyze the two texts with regard to form and content and focuses on the on protagonists' worlds. In Şahín's interpretation, Ağaoğlu's protagonist Aysel is narrated in postmodern intertextuality as an individual of our days alienated from society, searching for her self/selves as she cannot succeed in dying. Both Beckett's and Ağaoğlu's protagonists attempt to "escape" from their selves and …

History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …