Reading and Language Commons^™

Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Hearing the Cry in Black Diasporic and Latina/o Poetics" Rachel Ellis Neyra expands upon Edouard Glissant's notion of "the cry of the Plantation" and shows how to listen for it in literary arrangement of Derek Walcott, Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, Ralph Ellison, Miguel Algarín, and James Baldwin. Ellis Neyra also reads musical lyrics by Oscar D'León and Billie Holiday and the melodic nuances of salsa, jazz, the blues, and bomba for how they sound out what she calls the New World Cry, a mnemonic figure of the Plantation of the Americas and a metaphor for how estrangement …

Social Science Journals In Interwar Romania And The U.S. Model Of Sociology, Valentina Pricopie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Social Science Journals in Interwar Romania and the U.S. Model of Sociology" Valentina Pricopie analyzes the US-American presence in two journals of the Bucharest School of Sociology between the two world wars, as well as the information provided by US articles with regard to the US-American sociological model and its developments. Pricopie's analysis suggests strong academic connections, cooperation, and consistent exchange of academic knowledge between the two schools of thought. The analysis is based a quantitative study of the archives including the frequency of occurrence of items in thirty-one issues of Arhiva pentru Ştiinţa şi Reforma Socială …

2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, Author Of "Little Princes: One Man's Promise To Bring Home The Lost Children Of Nepal.", Conor Grennan

Common Book Program

Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.

Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, And Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels Of The 1920s And Beyond, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Willa Cather: A Memoir, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant makes Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather’s life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to the forefront. Describing Cather’s “personal life” in the 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited their Five Bank Street apartment,

Edith Lewis, who now worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said … must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows …

The Role Of Young Hoosier Book Award Nominees In The Classroom: Using Approaches To Multicultural Education As A Lens For Evaluating Literature, Shaylyn Barrie Marks

Open Access Dissertations

This study demonstrates the need for the integration of multiculturalism in the K-12 curriculum as well as provides a heuristic based on the work conducted by Sleeter and Grant (2009) to evaluate literature for level of multiculturalism. In the study, the researcher uses an evaluate heuristic to critically analyze and evaluation ten of the books from the 2011-2012 Young Hoosier Book Award (YHBA) nominee list. The heuristic created for this study is applied to the books appearing on the YHBA nominee list to evaluate each book on an individual basis, but also by association, the types of books that that …

Improving Metacomprehension And Calibration Accuracy Through Embedded Cognitive And Metacognitive Strategy Prompts, Alan J. Reid

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

A societal shift from print-based to digital texts has afforded the ability to embed reader support within an instructional text. Numerous factors make eBooks an attractive option for colleges and universities, though undergraduates consistently reaffirm a preference for print-based materials. Given that many undergraduates arrive to college with a deficiency in reading comprehension skills and metacognitive awareness, digital text is able to offer an additional layer of support. A sample population of college undergraduates (N = 80) read an expository text on the basics of photography in the form of a fill-in field PDF. The most robust treatment (mixed) read …

Selected Bibliography For Work In Reading, Literacy, And Pedagogy, Geert Vandermeersche, Kris Rutten, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Video Games And Citizenship, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games and Citizenship" Jeroen Bourgonjon and Ronald Soetaert argue that digitization problematizes and broadens our perspective on culture and popular media and that this has important ramifications for our understanding of citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert respond to the call of Gert Biesta for the contextualized study of young people's practices by exploring a particular aspect of digitization that affects young people, namely video games. They explore the new social spaces which emerge in video game culture and how these spaces relate to community building and citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert also examine whether these social spaces can …

Rhetorical Analysis Of Literary Culture In Social Reading Platforms, Joachim Vlieghe, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms" Joachim Vlieghe and Kris Rutten present a case study of the discourse surrounding literary phenomena that are emerging within social media. The case study is part of a methodological exploration within literacy studies whereby the social media's transformative effects on literary literacies are studied by focusing on language as symbolic and situated action. Vlieghe and Rutten have identified unique social reading platforms based on a prolonged study of the social media environment. The analysis of the developers' discourse on social reading platforms shows how developers are formulating new …

Introduction To Literacy And Society, Culture, Media And Education, Kris Rutten, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literature, Digital Humanities, And The Age Of The Encyclopedia, Gunther Martens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Age of the Encyclopedia" Gunther Martens takes his cue from Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities in order to discuss the way in which literature relates to new developments in technology. Martens argues that it is useful to situate some of the fears accompanying literature's renewed (and debated) exposure to media and technology against the background of a similar discussions earlier: the historical perspective allows to identify and link three specific discourses underpinning the debate, namely: education, rhetoric, and the concept of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia and encyclopedic literature comprise and …

Using New Media In Teaching Greek Roma Students, Fenia Frangoulidou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Using New Media in Teaching Greek Roma Students" Fenia Frangoulidou discusses the use of media material as a supplementary teaching tool in a Roma classroom. Since 2011, Aristotle University has been running a European Union funded project that deals with a wide range of supportive measures for Roma students. Sociologists, social workers, and educators are the primary participants responsible for its implementation. In her study Frangoulidou discusses gender relations and racism and presents an analysis of the participation and interaction of six high school students in a mixed class of twenty-eight students. The purpose of the study …

About The Destruction, Continuation, And Transformation Of Art, Frank Maet

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "About the Destruction, Continuation, and Transformation of Art" Maet offers an answer to the question raised by Arthur C. Danto's thesis how to discern art from non-art? Maet considers art from the perspective of a technologically mediated reality and he distinguishes three different views on contemporary visual art: the destruction, the continuation, and the transformation of art. Maet considers these three artistic views as different strategies to deal with our current technological condition and evaluates the merits of each of them. He argues that our thoroughly designed reality turns the strategy of artistic destruction into a dangerous …

Perspectives On Literary Reading And Book Culture, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Perspectives on Literary Reading and Book Culture" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert provide a narrative framework for analyzing literary scholars' argumentation in the debate on literature and the humanities. Starting from MacIntyre's narrative description of epistemic "crises" they analyze the stories authors construct and the positions they take and ascribe to others within larger developing (grand) narratives on the value and function of literary reading. Both traditional narratives and new alternative (i.e., enlarged) narratives are discussed in how they set up and frame the argument and how they create dichotomies.

Reading, Literacy, And Education, Mikko Lehtonen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading, Literacy, and Education" Mikko Lehtonen outlines a contextual approach to literacy. He asks how the changing relations of culture and economy, transformation of nation states and national cultures and changing notions concerning affect and cognition, transform notions of literacy and reading. Relying on the results of a recent Finnish research project on new reading communities and new ways of reading, Lehtonen highlights substantial continuities in the reading habits of the so called Google generation when compared to other generations of readers. Print media is not, however, connected self-evidently to cognitive reading among the said generation. Lehtonen …

Rhetoric, Citizenship, And Cultural Literacy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Cultural Literacy" Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert start from concerns in contemporary educational debates about a growing lack of civic literacy. These complaints are raised both in the public sphere, in institutions of pedagogy, and in scholarship about the form, content, and function of civic literacy and civic education. Although there is an ongoing debate about the alleged decrease of political interest and the current state of civic literacy, it is clear that civic education has become an important focus of different governmental initiatives. Rutten and Soetaert aim to move away from a straightforward …

Integrating Social Media In Education, Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe, Pieter Verdegem

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Integrating Social Media in Education" Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe and Pieter Verdegem propose a framework in order to integrate social media literacy in an educational setting. In today's networked society students are new media users and hence the relevance in curricula to include social media literacy. Vanwynsberghe and Verdegem propose a multidimensional conceptual framework of social media literacy that includes the practical, cognitive, and affective competencies needed to deal with information of social media, to communicate with others through social media, to create content on social media, and to handle the consequences related to these three activities. On the …

Practical And Theoretical Implications Of Digitizing The Middle Ages, Roberta Capelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Practical and Theoretical Implications of Digitalizing the Middle Ages" Roberta Capelli discusses scholarship about and the teaching of medieval culture in digital humanities. While every medieval manuscript is an individual entity, displaying a series of unique and unrepeatable material, structural and aesthetic characteristics, digital devices are able to generate only two-dimensional photographic reproductions. However, the digital medium brings about some major improvements in the study — and teaching — of medieval manuscripts because the hypertextual nature of its applications allows us to analyse simultaneously synchronic and the diachronic dynamics. From a theoretical point of view, the difference …

Foreword, David Kutzko, Molly Lynde-Recchia

Transference

Thoughts on the inaugural volume by editors-in-chief David Kutzko and Molly Lynde-Recchia.

Transference Vol. 1, Summer 2013

Transference

Transference is published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Dedicated to the celebration of poetry in translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, Classical Greek and Latin, Japanese, and Russian into English verse. Transference contains translations as well as commentaries on the art and process of translating.

To The Jew First: A Socio-Historical And Biblical-Theological Analysis Of The Pauline Teaching Of `Election' In Light Of Second Temple Jewish Patterns Of Thought, Anthony Thornhill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Paul's "doctrine" of election has remained a controversial and enigmatic topic for centuries. Few studies, however, have approached Paul's doctrine through the context of Second Temple Judaism. This study examines Paul's view of election through the lens of Second Temple Jewish texts written prior to 70 CE. In doing so, it is argued that the best framework through which to view Paul's discussion of election is through a primarily corporate model of election. While such a model is rooted in Judaism, Paul departs from his Jewish contemporaries in arguing that the locus of election is in God's Messiah, Jesus.

Content Video In A Low-Stakes Listening Test: Efl Learners' Perceptions Of The Video Input And Strategy Use, Sukanya Tanewong

PASAA

This article reports the findings of an investigation into the perceptions of EFL learners regarding video input used in a listening test and the strategies they employed during the comprehension process. Content videos composed of TV commercial messages (TVCMs) and public service announcements (PSAs) were used as the listening texts and question preview, along with repeated input, were embedded in the test design. Forty-three EFL learners took the test and expressed their opinions about it via questionnaire. Twenty students were then purposively selected for retrospective interviews. Their perceptions of the video input and their strategy use while comprehending the video …

Review Of Janine Barchas, Matters Of Fact In Jane Austen: History, Location, And Celebrity, Laura White

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Janine Barchas’s thought-provoking study of Austen’s naming practices unearths a wealth of historical antecedents for Austen’s characters and posits an Austen whose gamesmanship with the names of persons and places rivals the knowingness and playfulness of James Joyce. In earlier decades, such a highly ambitious and wide-reaching work could not have been accomplished except through protracted antiquarian research. Web scholarship, however, has made it possible for Barchas to uncover in a relatively short time a remarkable array of the many interconnected historical figures bearing such names as Wentworth, Darcy, Vernon, Ferrars, Allen, and Dashwood whose heroic exploits, political machinations, tragic …

A Special Talk With Professor Richard Donato The University Of Pittsburgh, Pramarn Subphadoongchone

PASAA

In this issue, we are privileged to have an interview with Professor Richard Donato, Chairperson of the Department of Instruction and Learning in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Donato's research interest lies in the areas of second and foreign language acquisition, early language learning, classroom discourse analysis, and sociocultural theory. He has worked internationally on language education issues, and his work has appeared in a broad range of prestigious journals. With his wealth of publication and editorial experience, he has graciously shared with us invaluable practical tips and considerations in writing for scholarly publication in …

Considerations In Performance-Based Language Assessment: Rating Scales And Rater Training, Bordin Chinda

PASAA

Performance-based assessment has gained more attention from ELT practitioners since the actual performances produced by students are evaluated in this type of assessment. However, the assessment of students' performances involves more complicated procedures when compared with more traditional testing methods. This paper, therefore, points out crucial considerations in adopting this type of assessment in a language class. First, the article introduces the concepts of performance-based language assessment and its major characteristics. Then, the two main characteristics: rating scales and rater training are discussed. In the rating scales section, different types of rating scales, as well as approaches in developing rating …

English In Southeast Asia: Features, Policy And Language In Use, Srowcha Dumrongthaveesak

PASAA

Low, E. L., & Azirah. H. (Eds.). (2012). English in Southeast Asia: Features, policy and language in use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

An Analysis Of English Language Learning Needs And Problems Of Underprivileged Children In A Slum Area In Bangkok Metropolis, Chanisara Tangkijmongkol, Punchalee Wasanasomsithi

PASAA

For underprivileged children living in a slum area, education is one of the primary tools contributing to a better life when they grow up. The present study aimed at investigating the needs and problems in English language learning of disadvantaged children in the Klong Toey slum, the largest slum in the Bangkok Metropolis. Data were collected by means of questionnaires and interviews with 100 children, volunteer teachers, and community members. The study findings showed that children from the slum area realize the significance of English and that they are interested in learning English through games, songs, videos, and TV programs. …

Politeness Strategies In Research Articles: A Cross-Disciplinary Study, Kunyarut Getkham

PASAA

This corpus-based study investigates cross-disciplinary differences in the use of politeness strategies in research articles (RAs). The corpus consists of thirty-six RAs from applied linguistics, educational technology, and economics journals published in the year 2009. The data were statistically analyzed. Findings indicate that in academic/ research writing, writers employed both positive and negative politeness strategies when expressing opinions but the negative politeness strategies, especially impersonality devices and hedges, were the most frequently used by writers of RAs in the three disciplines. The use of impersonality and the use of hedging devices play a vital part in RAs especially in the …

When Affective Factors Change: A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Students' Reflections In English E-Portfolios, Wasana Phasomyard, Pattamawan Jimarkon, Sonthida Keyuravong

PASAA

Affective factors can play an important role in learning and may change over time. This paper investigates emotional states of first-year engineering students towards self-study experience through words associated with affect used in their reflections in eportfolios over a semester. The study employed a corpusbased analysis by focusing on keywords of affect with the statistical criteria and analyzing the context those keywords occurred in. To uncover the students' recurrent feelings, the concordance lines for each keyword were further analyzed qualitatively to identify each of them into a category of pre-determined affective factors. Then, relative frequencies of each instance of each …

Pmi - A Tool For Student Reflection, Ubon Sanpatchayapong

PASAA

This idea-sharing paper is written from my own teaching experience with tertiary level students who studied English for Specific Purposes (ESP). These courses were English foundation subjects, and they were mandatory for first- and second-year students at my university. I used PMI (de Bono, 1993) with year one students to get their reflection after class in order to learn about their problems, progress, and reactions toward each class so that I could understand them and could give them relevant facilitation. Though I took care of more than one class each semester, I will focus on solely a class I have …