Reading: eBooks

With digital screens becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the lives of children, from their homes to their classrooms, understanding the influence of these technologies on the ways children read takes on great importance. The aim of this edited volume is to examine how advances in technology are shaping children's reading skills and development. The chapters in this volume explore the influence of various aspects of digital texts, the child's cognitive and motivational skills, and the child's environment on reading development in digital contexts. Each chapter draws upon the expertise of scientists and researchers across countries and disciplines to review what is currently known about the influence of technology on reading, how it is studied, and to offer new insights and research directions based on recent work.

After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favourites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn't like, guilty pleasures. On Rereading records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

"In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called 'the Casanova of reading,' argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species."

This descriptive study of reading-to-write examines a critical point in every college student's academic performance: when he or she is faced with the task of reading a source, integrating personal ideas, and creating an individual text with a self-defined purpose. Offering an unusually comprehensive view of this process, the authors chart a group of freshmen as they study and write in their dormitories, recording their'think-aloud'strategies for reading, writing, and revising, their interpretation of the task, and their broader social, cultural, and contextual understanding of college writing.

"In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Robert DeMaria considers the surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. Johnson's relationship to books not only reveals much about his life and times, DeMaria contends, but also provides a dramatic counterpoint to modern reading habits. As a superior practitioner of the craft, Johnson provides a compelling model for how to read..."