We read,we write: reconsidering reading–writing relationships in primary school children

The extent to which children's reading experiences influence their writing production is not well understood. It is imperative that the connections between these literacy practices are elucidated in order to inform the development of stimulating curricula and to support children's development. This paper presents new data and key findings from a project investigating relationships between children's free choice reading and volitional writing in Key Stage 2 (9–10 years). The data were collected in two primary schools in northern England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data were collected using an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data were provided through independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data using a multiliteracies approach, we demonstrate that the writing that children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. The child readers in this project encountered texts in different media and created texts in a range of genres. By examining a sample of children's written texts from the data set, we show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. Children creatively work across media, and in doing so the boundaries of traditional text genres and styles are redeveloped and redesigned. These findings highlight the importance of providing children with opportunities to freely choose and create texts and recognising the wide variety of text experiences that children bring to their classroom learning.     

Exploring the eye‐movement patterns as Chinese children read texts: a developmental perspective

This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low‐frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word‐based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye‐movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text.     

Bridging Literary and Philosophical Genres: Judgement,reflection and education in Camus’The Fall

Both literature and philosophy, as genres of writing, can enable us to address important ontological, epistemological and ethical questions. One author who makes it possible for readers to bridge these two genres is Albert Camus. Nowhere is this more evident than in Camus’ short novel, The Fall. The Fall, through the character and words of Jean‐Baptiste Clamence, prompts readers to reflect deeply on themselves, their motivations and commitments, and their relations with others. This paper discusses the origin and structure of the book, identifies some of its key philosophical themes, and explores some of its educational implications.     

Optical Solutions: Reception of an NSF-Funded Science Comic Book on the Biology of the Eye

This article traces the reception of a “science comic book” by various audiences including readers and reviewers after publication as well as grant application review committees vetting the proposed project in its conceptual stage. Specifically, the work is a biology textbook containing comics-style visual explanations couched in the form of an imaginative story interwoven with and supplementing traditional text-based explanations of the same ideas. The analysis uses Genette’s concept of “paratexts” (i.e., a class of speech genres comprising those supplementary texts that contextualize and inform readers’ interpretations of the primary text that they accompany) to examine the rhetoric of the visual in the discourse of science education. This analysis observes that the stigmatization of comics as a medium played some role in how readers, critics, and reviewers responded to the text. The implications of this stigma for cultural conceptions of science and their relationships to other knowledge domains, including the arts and humanities, raise a concern for the mediation of public impressions of science as an institution.     

论《古文渊鉴》体制“权舆于六籍”

《古文渊鉴》是清初一部大型古文选本,选文自《左传》至两宋,共计1365篇。《序》中指出古文体制“靡不根柢于群经,权舆于六籍”,属于我国传统文学批评“文本于经”的范畴。考查《古文渊鉴》的体制与内容,我们发现其“尊经”更多地是从内容和功用方面,而非文体方面。其以“经”为径,“明道”为旨,“致用”是目的。这对于我们更深刻地理解《古文渊鉴》和“文本于经”的内涵都具有积极的促进作用。     

When genres meet: Inquiry into a sixth‐grade urban science class

In this study, we explore oral and written work (plays and rap songs) of students in a sixth‐grade all African‐American urban science class to reveal ways affective and social aspects are intertwined with students' cognition. We interpret students' work in terms of the meeting of various genres brought by the students and teachers to the classroom. Students bring youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and perhaps their own science genres. Teachers bring their favored classroom and science genres. We show how students' affective reactions were an integral part of their constructed scientific knowledge. Their knowledge building emerged as a social process involving a range of transactions among students and between students and teacher, some transactions being relatively smooth and others having more friction. Along with their developing science genre, students portrayed elements of classroom genres that did not exist in the classroom genre that the teacher sought to bring to the class. Students' work offered us a glimpse of students' interpretations of gender dynamics in their classrooms. Gender also was related to the particular ways that students in that class included disagreement in their developing science genre. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 579–605, 2002     

Static and animated graphics in learning from interactive texts

Animating the graphics in electronic documents may increase readers’ willingness to study them but may impair or distort the processes of gist comprehension. Experiment 1 confirmed that, compared with static diagrams, animation increased readers willingness to study a range of graphic genres (maps, time-lines, drawings of unfamiliar objects). Total reading time was also increased but readers’ differential access of static and animated graphics confounded the interpretation of immediate and delayed retention tests. Experiment 2 contrasted the effects of accessing the graphics before or during reading. Scores on a quiz immediately after reading were significantly higher when the graphics were seen before rather than during reading, suggesting that readers found it difficult to integrate the graphics while still building the gist of the text. Scores on both an immediate and a delayed quiz were significantly higher when the graphics were static rather than animated. One pointer to the cause of the decrement with animated graphics was that the quiz performance of readers having animated graphics correlated with their scores on a picture memory test, whereas those of readers with static graphics did not. In contrast the delayed quiz scores of readers with static graphics showed a significant interaction with their performance on a digit memory task. Readers with high scores on digit memory benefited from accessing the graphics while reading, but readers with low scores on the digit test were impaired by such access during reading. This suggests that the cognitive skills needed for integrating text with animated graphics may differ from those needed for dealing with static graphics.     

行政公文读者分析

行政公写作活动中，读不仅担当着将公内容转化为工作行动的中介作用，而且在公写作的整个活动中干预制约着作用，也直接影响公的写作效果和社会价值的实现。满足不同读的阅读需要是实现公社会价值的重要因素之一。读分析是现代应用写作理论研究中一个不容忽视的重要研究内容。     

Testing times: the impact of prior knowledge on written genres produced in examination settings

This article explores the relationship between children's prior knowledge of spoken and written discourses and how this influences their attempts at examination writing. Particular emphasis is given to task demand in examination questions and how frequently this fails to acknowledge how prior knowledge might be realized in response to the question. School writing has specific genres of its own, genres which, although they may partially mirror genres found outside school, are nonetheless very specific. A significant factor in school genres is they emphasize an asymmetric power relationship between the teacher and the writer, with the teacher not only knowing the conventions of the genre, but often also acting as the determiner of the title, and as the arbiter of the finished piece of writing. Moreover, children whose home background has socioculturally prepared them for production of written genres are advantaged over those with different cultural and meaning‐making resources available to them.     

Guidelines for Reporting and Evaluating Qualitative Research: What are the alternatives?

There is more to guidelines for qualitative research reports than that proposed in Smith-Sebasto (2000). Our response to the article illustrates a range of alternatives to the position and criteria outlined by Smith-Sebasto. We draw on examples from across the wider literature to explore themes and issues regarding the purpose(s) of guidelines, their content and how they are structured. Our core argument is that deliberations on the process and product of judging the quality of qualitative research in environmental education research require the recognition of two points regularly contested within the literature on guidelines. Firstly, the existence of a wide variety of types, genres and forms of qualitative research; and secondly, the proposition that criteria for judging research quality contain within them, implicitly or explicitly, a defining view of what research is, and perhaps more contentiously, what it should be.     

大学英语阅读中的语境分析

大学英语阅读中,读者不能正确理解阅读材料的一个重要原因是他们无法理解生词的意思.对于生词不能较准确地猜测出含义,又主要是因为读者不能较好地从语境中把握信息.只有从语言因素与非语言因素两个方面着手,才能更好理解阅读材料.     

‘You Never Know,Things Might Have Once Existed’: Young Readers Engaging with Postmodern Texts that Blur the Boundaries between Fact and Fiction

This article considers children’s engagement with the Ologies, a series of postmodern texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. It follows on from a text-based analysis of the series published in this journal (22(3) 2015). Data collected from 9–12 year olds demonstrate how actual readers took up the invitation offered by the text and were able to identify the tension between realism and fantasy, oscillate between different genres, stop to play games and use the tactile to make meaning. In addition, they willingly brought their own knowledge of the world to the text and were able to tease out meanings through dialogic interaction. We argue that the meaningful discussion that ensued is due to the multi-layered nature of the books which offers agency to the pupils with little adult interference.     

Genre effects on higher education students' text reading for understanding

This study provides empirical support for the proposalthat student learning in higher education is affectednot only by prior subject knowledge and by approachesto learning but also by ability to deal with textgenre. It first explores how 22 higher degreestudents on a course in education understood selectedtext extracts from different genres when reading attheir own pace under conditions expected to promotethorough understanding. After reading a text eachstudent wrote answers to a set of questions abouttheir reading and understanding of the text. Intape-recorded discussion with another reader of thesame text they then looked for similarities anddifferences between their responses. They laterreported on their feelings about the task and text. Understandings were found to vary between readers ofthe same text, difference being largely attributed bythe students to difficulty with the language andstructure of the texts in terms which pointed to thegenre. Considerable anxiety about difficulty anddifference in understanding was partly allayed throughdiscussion, but understanding was not much furthered. Most students felt that more work on the texts wouldbe fruitful.In a second part of the study a further 39 studentsfrom a new intake to the same course were asked abouttext types in their recommended and actual coursereading. The types they reported as most frequentlyrecommended were also felt to be the most difficultfor reasons to do with text genre. They were alsothose from which the earlier text extracts had beendrawn. Theoretical and practical issues arediscussed.     

Distilling wisdom from practice: Finding meaning in PDS stories

Much of what has been written about the Professional Development School (PDS) experience consists of recounting personal experiences. However, these accounts often offer little to readers since they are neither good research nor good storytelling. In this article I draw on mythology, folklore, psychology and literature to suggest that effective storytelling can serve the same function in nurturing PDS culture as it does in the maintenance of culture in general. After identifying potential story elements in the PDS experience, I propose ways in which to borrow from various literary genres to create PDS stories that are more engaging and meaningful.     

Eye-movement patterns and reader characteristics of students with good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams

This study investigated the cognitive processes and reader characteristics of sixth graders who had good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams. We first measured the reading ability and reading self-efficacy of sixth-grade participants, and then recorded their eye movements while they were reading an illustrated scientific text and scored their answers to content-related questions. Finally, the participants evaluated the difficulty of the article, the attractiveness of the content and diagram, and their learning performance. The participants were then classified into groups based on how many correct responses they gave to questions related to reading. The results showed that readers with good performance had better character recognition ability and reading self-efficacy, were more attracted to the diagrams, and had higher self-evaluated learning levels than the readers with poor performance did. Eye-movement data indicated that readers with good performance spent significantly more reading time on the whole article, the text section, and the diagram section than the readers with poor performance did. Interestingly, readers with good performance had significantly longer mean fixation duration on the diagrams than readers with poor performance did; further, readers with good performance made more saccades between the text and the diagrams. Additionally, sequential analysis of eye movements showed that readers with good performance preferred to observe the diagram rather than the text after reading the title, but this tendency was not present in readers with poor performance. In sum, using eye-tracking technology and several reading tests and questionnaires, we found that various cognitive aspects (reading strategy, diagram utilization) and affective aspects (reading self-efficacy, article likeness, diagram attraction, and self-evaluation of learning) affected sixth graders’ reading performance in this study.     

Whitewashing Nature: Sanitized Depictions of Biology in Children’s Books and Parent–Child Conversation

The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. Do children’s books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children’s nature books (Study 1), we found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and reading levels. When parents encountered negative information in books (Studies 2–3), they did not omit it but rather elaborated on it, adding their own comments and questions, and their children (ages 3–11) were more likely to remember the negative information but less likely to generalize that information beyond the animal in the book. These findings suggest that early input relevant to biological competition may hamper children’s developing understanding of ecology and evolution.     

Learning from commercial entertainment producers in order to create entertainment sex education

The Girlfriend Guide to Life was a commercial entertainment product co-edited by an entertainment producer and an academic researcher to reach 14–17-year olds with information they wanted to know about sexual health, in language, genres and designs that they wanted. Entertainment–Education is a familiar approach to distributing information, including information about sexual health, in non-formal learning contexts. However, previous accounts of Entertainment–Education have highlighted a tension between the audience-centred approach of entertainment production and the message-centred approach of education. Using a practice-led methodology and drawing on reflective practice, this article suggests that if educators go deeper than asking entertainment producers to simply make cosmetic changes to content, and accept that entertainment producers have a vital understanding of what target audiences need to know about sexual health, a reciprocal working relationship can be developed that overcomes some of the differences in habitus between entertainment producers and educators that have been identified by previous researchers.     

《文心雕龙》的文体分类论——和《昭明文选》文体分类的比较

《昭明文选》和《文心雕龙》都对文体加以分类，特别重视诗和赋两种文体。但它们是两部性质不同的书，对文学分类的角度也不尽相同。《文心雕龙》作为一部理论著作，重在研究和阐述各类文体的历史发展及创作特征；而《昭明文选》是一部文学作品的选本，重点在选出各类文体中最优秀的代表性作品。前者偏重于从文学理论方面去研究文体的类别，而后者则偏重于从文学创作角度区别不同文体。前者以理论为标准，不论作品好坏，只要有理论上的意义，就需要提出来讨论；后者以创作为标准，选出优秀作品，有些文类没有好作品，则可以不选。     

阅读，你往哪里去？

文学的丰盛繁荣,似乎已不再是文学的内容品质所能左右,作品只有在当下阅读中取得绝对存在权,才可能躲避束之高阁失去存在意义的危险。在庞大复杂、变换更迭的写作流冲撞下,阅读同时被赋予了重大使命,在或期待或激发或改变的运动中,成为作者与读者潜在较量、交流的一把标尺,一个疑难。     

Implications of Professional Writing Experiences of Academic Veterinary Scientists for Technical Writing Pedagogy

Five academic veterinary scientists were interviewed to learn about their professional writing experiences and relate them to technical writing pedagogy. The interviews probed the genres in which they write, their composing methods, their professional attitudes toward writing, and the sources of training in writing. The data suggest that while writing is an integral part of their research, teaching, and professional advancement and is used in conducting business, the academic scientific curriculum does not specifically address this important element in their careers.