This lively, nuanced history of New York City's early public libraries traces their evolution within the political, social, and cultural worlds that supported them. On May 11, 1911, the New York ...Public Library opened its "marble palace for book lovers" on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This was the city's first public library in the modern sense, a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York's reading publics had access to a range of "public libraries" as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries simply meant a shared collection of books that was available to the general public and promoted the public good. From the founding in 1754 of the New York Society Library up to 1911, public libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions, while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some, such as the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, were highly specialized; others, like the Astor Library, developed extensive, inclusive collections. What all the public libraries of this period had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic-that good reading promoted the public good. Tom Glynn's vivid, deeply researched history of New York City's public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of "public" and "private," and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City's public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city's early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.
By examining clerical book collections in Norway 1650-1750, this book describes the flow of books in one of the northernmost areas of Europe, a flow dependant on three networking areas in particular, ...namely Germany, the Netherlands and England.
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britainasks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did ...law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?
Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.
Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history.How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britainreshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Motivating Reading Comprehension Wigfield, Allan; Perencevich, Kathleen C; Guthrie, John T
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1997, 20040520, 2004, 2004-00-00, 2004-05-20
eBook, Book
Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) is a unique, classroom-tested model of reading instruction that breaks new ground by explicitly showing how content knowledge, reading strategies, and ...motivational support all merge in successful reading instruction. A theoretical perspective (engagement in reading) frames the book and provides a backdrop for its linkage between hands-on science activities and reading comprehension. Currently funded by the Interagency Educational Research Initiative (IERI), this model has been extensively class tested and is receiving national attention that includes being featured on a PBS special on the teaching of reading.Key features of this outstanding new volume include:*Theoretical Focus--CORI's teaching framework revolves around the engagement perspective of reading: how engaged reading develops and the classroom contexts and motivational supports that promote it.*Content-Area Focus--Although science is the content area around which CORI has been developed, its basic framework is applicable to other content areas.*Focus on Strategy Instruction--CORI revolves around a specific set of reading strategies that the National Reading Panel (2000) found to be effective. In some current CORI classrooms collaborating teachers implement all aspects of CORI and in other classrooms teachers implement just the strategy instruction component. *Illustrative Vignettes and Cases--Throughout the book vignettes and mini-case studies convey a situated view of instructional practices for reading comprehension and engagement. A detailed case study of one teacher and of the reading progress of her students is featured in one chapter. This book is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in education and psychology, for practicing teachers, and for researchers in reading comprehension and motivation.
Everyone agrees that reading is important, but kids today tend to lose interest in reading before adolescence. In "Raising Kids Who Read", bestselling author and psychology professor Daniel T. ...Willingham explains this phenomenon and provides practical solutions for engendering a love of reading that lasts into adulthood. Like Willingham's much-lauded previous work, "Why Don't Students Like School?", this new book combines evidence-based analysis with engaging, insightful recommendations for the future. Intellectually rich argumentation is woven seamlessly with entertaining current cultural references, examples, and steps for taking action to encourage reading. The three key elements for reading enthusiasm--decoding, comprehension, and motivation--are explained in depth in "Raising Kids Who Read". Teachers and parents alike will appreciate the practical orientation toward supporting these three elements from birth through adolescence. Most books on the topic focus on early childhood, but Willingham understands that kids' needs change as they grow older, and the science-based approach in "Raising Kids Who Read" applies to kids of all ages. The book provides: (1) A practical perspective on teaching reading from bestselling author and K-12 education expert Daniel T. Willingham; (2) Research-based, concrete suggestions to aid teachers and parents in promoting reading as a hobby; and (3) Information on helping kids with dyslexia and encouraging reading in the digital age Debunking the myths about reading education, "Raising Kids Who Read" will empower you to share the joy of reading with kids from preschool through high school.
Birth of the symbol Struck, Peter T
2004., 20090209, 2009, 2004, c2004., 2004-01-01
eBook, Book
Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck ...explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic "symbol." The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. "They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative," he writes, "with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages."
Based on a wealth of compelling arguments,Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narratoris an important addition to literary studies, eighteenth-century history, and book and print culture.
The twofold purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relative importance of decoding skills to reading comprehension in reading development and to identify which reader characteristics and ...reading assessment characteristics contribute to differences in the decoding and reading comprehension correlation. A meta-analysis of 110 studies found a sizeable average corrected correlation (r̄c = .74). Two reader characteristics (age and listening comprehension level) were significant moderators of the relationship. Several assessment characteristics were significant moderators, particularly for young readers: the way that decoding was measured and, with respect to the reading comprehension assessment, text genre; whether or not help was provided with decoding; and whether or not the texts were read aloud. Age and measure of decoding were the strongest moderators. We discuss the implications of these findings for assessment and the diagnosis of reading difficulties.
Adolescents with reading disability (RD) participated in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a multiple-component reading intervention with motivational components (PHAST). A ...total of 514 youth in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade formed instructional groups (4-8) that were randomly assigned to one of three conditions-one of two PHAST interventions (additional comprehension or fluency training) or a remedial reading control condition. Intervention occurred in participants' schools, 40-60 min daily, 3-5×/week, for 100-125 hr total. Over four outcome assessments, multilevel growth models evaluated intervention/control differences in growth over time, and post-intervention effect sizes. The two PHAST interventions were associated with equivalent positive outcomes, and their data combined. PHAST participants out-performed Control participants on 8 of 16 outcomes, demonstrating greater growth on standardized and experimental reading and spelling outcomes. PHAST-instructed students demonstrated higher sense of reading competence, and increased attributions of reading success to their own abilities. Intervention effect sizes (Hedge's g) comparing PHAST versus Control growth were larger for foundational reading skills (.78 for nonword decoding, .56 for word identification) than for reading comprehension (.36 for passage comprehension), for which effects were more equivocal. An effect size of .61 was obtained for sense of reading competence. A year later, the PHAST participants demonstrated continued improvement on later-developing reading skills like word reading efficiency, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Intensive reading intervention in middle school can produce gains on multiple dimensions of reading skill and motivation and foster continuing growth of higher-order reading skills.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Can reading intervention still make a positive impact for adolescents with persistent reading problems-those who failed to adequately respond to or never received early reading intervention? We developed and evaluated an intervention for middle school youth who were reading significantly below age and grade-level expectations and who met criteria for reading disability. We offered 100-125 hr of small group remedial intervention designed to address both the reading and the motivational problems of students with persistent reading disabilities in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. We compared the research-based PHAST Program with an equivalent amount of remedial reading instruction offered by Special Education teachers. These control group students made reading gains over the course of their intervention classes, but students in the PHAST intervention showed significantly greater improvement on standardized reading and spelling tests and on a self-report motivation measure of perceived reading competence. A year after their programs ended, PHAST students continued to improve on later-developing reading skills like word reading speed, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. These findings are encouraging because they demonstrate that multiple components of these older readers' reading systems still can be changed with intensive research-based intervention in the early years of adolescence.
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