Reading and Literacy
jgoldman | December 5, 2010
I've got an article that appeared in this week's Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about recent research from Hadassah University on the neurobiology of bilingual (English-Hebrew) reading.
Is the English-reading brain somehow different from the Hebrew-reading brain? You might not expect any major differences; after all, both languages are alphabetic and are read more or less phonetically by breaking words into their constituent sounds. Compare English and Hebrew to a logographic language like Chinese or Japanese, and the similarity between the alphabetic languages becomes obvious. But…
jgoldman | May 27, 2010Some kids more readily recognize Ronald McDonald than the President of the United States of America. Sad, right?
Check out this exchange, from the 2004 movie Super Size Me:
Morgan Spurlock: [to kids] I'm gonna show you some pictures and I want you to tell me who they are.
Children: OK.
Morgan Spurlock: [Showing a picture of George Washington] Who's that?
Child: George Washington?
Morgan Spurlock: Good. Who was he?
Children: He was the 4th president. He freed the slaves. He could never tell a lie.
Morgan Spurlock: [Shows picture that you can't see] Who's that?
Child: George W. Bush?
Morgan…
jgoldman | April 29, 2010Yesterday, at our department's end-of-the-year party, I was informed that I was one of two winners this year of the Outstanding Research Poster Award.
Figure 1: And I have a nifty little certificate to prove it!
Figure 2: Here it is.
jgoldman | April 17, 2010A recent paper from the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy came across my desktop yesterday called e-Reading and e-Responding: New Tools for the Next Generation of Readers.
In it, Lotta C. Larson describes her observation of 10 fifth-grade students who were given access to an e-reader containing two recent award-winning books, both by Christopher Paul Curtis: Bud, Not Buddy, and The Watsons Go To Birmingham-1963.
She observed that at first they used the e-reader's highlighter function to mark passages that they thought they might be quizzed on. Once they realized they would not be…