Teaching Literature to Adolescents

Balancing act with books -- chicagotribune.com

Balancing act with books -- chicagotribune.com.

Balancing act with books Schools try to find right mix to keep students interested By Tara Malone | Chicago Tribune reporter

October 19, 2008 English teacher Jason Baker tries to hook his students on such giants of American literature as Hawthorne and Hemingway by conjuring the authors' timeless images of a scorned single mother or a love-struck soldier.

But the portrayals end decades before his students were born—a gap he and other teachers hope to narrow by rethinking their reading lists. "Macbeth" isn't going anywhere. Nor are literary staples like "The Great Gatsby" and "Lord of the Flies." But more contemporary works such as Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club" or David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars" are edging into classrooms as educators try to balance the classics with works whose tone and theme are more accessible to today's teenagers.

The push has become more urgent because research shows many students are shelving books altogether. The percent of 17-year-olds who do not read for pleasure has doubled in the past 20 years, according to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Just 43 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they read literature in 2002, continuing a decline that began two decades earlier. "We're talking [about reading] a play, short story, novel or poem in the last 12 months. . . . It's a low bar. We're not even saying you had to complete the book," said Sunil Iyengar, the group's director of research and analysis.

The drop in how much teens read outside of class has spurred changes in what they read inside it, teachers say. Many educators pair old novels with newer books or media—comparing "Romeo and Juliet" with a hip-hop song about unrequited love, for example. "There's always a conflict between what kids want to read and what they read in school," said Alleen Nilsen, an Arizona State University English professor and textbook author. "My philosophy . . . is that those lists in high school were made in my parents' generation, when only 10 to 20 percent of kids when to college."

Lit2Go: Download audio literature files

Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse has created another useful service, Lit2Go

This is one more step towards emphasizing the audio/performance aspect of literature where students listen to or perform literature.

You and your students can download Mp3 file from their free online collection of literary passages.  You and your students can search this collection by author, title, keywords, or reading level.  Each passage has an abstract, citation, playing time, and word count.  You can also download PDF files of the passages, something that would be useful to provide students with material for writing papers about particular authors, topics, themes, or literary periods.

The fact that these passages can be downloaded to iTunes means that students can listen to these passages on their iPod/Mp3 players.  They could also incorporate clips of these files (under fair-use) into podcasts about certain texts, authors, topics, or themes using podcasting editing programs like Audacity or Garageband. 

Poetry International Web - Introduction to PIW

Poetry International Web - Introduction to PIW.

Welcome to Poetry International Web, a worldwide forum for poetry on the internet.

PIW brings you news, essays, interviews and discussion, but, first and foremost, hundreds of poems by acclaimed modern poets from all around the world, both in the original language and in English translation.

In keeping with the spirit of the web, it is a truly international collaboration of at present more than twenty editors in more than twenty different countries – you will find them in the drop-down menu to the left. Each of these countries maintains its own national domain within PIW, with its chosen “Poet(s) of the Quarter”, interviews and other relevant articles.

The Poetry International Foundation in Rotterdam has provided a substantial amount of the poems from its archive, as well as an interesting collection of video material, Camera Poetica. The Defence of Poetry lecture series, given and simultaneously published on-line during the annual Poetry International Festival, invites poets of world-renown to defend their discipline. We hope that you’ll accept our invitation au voyage, have a long and enjoyable journey, and will bring some new acquaintances home with you.

TheStar.com | News | Read novels, be smarter

TheStar.com | News | Read novels, be smarter.

Read novels, be smarter

 Fiction appears to stimulate something in your brain that improves `social intelligence' Aug 10, 2008 Sam Kornell Special to the Star

Gurov is a failed opera singer who lives in Moscow and works in a bank. He dislikes and fears his wife, and is a practised philanderer. Alone in Yalta on vacation, he meets Anna, a young woman. Anna is also alone on vacation, and like Gurov is unhappy with her spouse, whom she considers a flunky. The two begin an affair. The affair lasts longer, and acquires more complexity, than either anticipated. That, in a nutshell, is "The Lady With The Dog," a 27-page short story written by the Russian author Anton Chekhov in 1899.

Knowing it, do feel any smarter? No? According to researchers at the University of Toronto, that's because you didn't get to read the actual text. Had you done that, they say, your "social intelligence" would have been measurably elevated. In fact, they contend that reading fiction – of any sort – will make you smarter. "For the first time in history there is now scientific evidence that reading fiction has psychological benefits," writes Keith Oatley in New Scientist.

Oatley is a professor of psychology and the leader of the Toronto team. He is also an award-winning novelist (The Case of Emily V.). On the phone from the University of Toronto, he explains that reading fiction appears to stimulate parts of the brain that govern empathy. "What you're doing when you're reading fiction is you're allowing yourself to become another person for a short period of time ... It loosens up your personality, your rigidities."

Oatley and his team ran a combination of experiments to arrive at this conclusion. First, they assembled a sample group split evenly between people who like and dislike fiction. Both groups took a series of diagnostic tests to determine their social acumen; the fiction readers, they found, demonstrated "substantially greater empathy" than their counterparts. But which came first, the chicken or the egg? Could it be that people who are naturally more socially intelligent gravitate toward fiction, that their affinity for novels is an expression, not a cause, of their talent for empathy?

To answer, the researchers came up with another experiment, this one involving Chekhov. First, researcher Maja Djikic wrote a "control" version of "The Lady With The Dog." Written in a documentary style, it was the same length as the original, described the same events and, crucially, was rated just as interesting by Group A, which read the control version, as Group B's rating of the actual text. Before and after the reading, both groups filled out questionnaires that evaluated their personality traits and emotions. "We found that people who read the Chekhov story underwent larger changes in personality than those who read the control text – although the types of changes varied from person to person," Oatley wrote in New Scientist. "We think that readers found it easier to identify with the characters in the literary story than in the documentary version. By empathizing with these characters, they became a bit more like them – but each in their own way." Oatley declined to speculate much further. He pointed out that similar experiments using video games or movies instead of Russian literature could very well produce comparable results. And he freely admitted to the many questions his findings do not resolve.

Will a short story by Chekhov produce the same result as a Tom Clancy airport thriller? In which is one more likely to gather knowledge about people: a pop novel or a literary memoir? And what about a piece of writing that purports to be non-fiction but is actually in large part made up – � la James Frey – or a piece of fiction that is actually a barely concealed recitation of things actual people actually did?

John Coy: Girls have reading down, but boys are losing interest

John Coy: Girls have reading down, but boys are losing interest.

John Coy: Girls have reading down, but boys are losing interest

Worse, in important ways the publishing industry seems to have given up trying to give them books on subjects that interest them.

By JOHN COY, Minneapolis Star Tribune

On a recent bookstore visit, a sign caught my eye: "Summer Reading for Teens." As an author of young adult novels, I was curious to see what books were selected for the table.

Fashionistas, mean girls, gossip girls, island girls, it girls, a whole sisterhood of traveling pants. Had I read the sign wrong? Was this the table of summer reading for girls? I checked the sign again: Summer Reading for Teens. I scanned the table. Where were the books for boys? Among the brightly colored covers, not a single book featured a male protagonist in a contemporary setting.

What would a male teen think about this table? Probably that summer reading didn't include him.

Just then a group of high school students came in with their teacher. A store employee greeted them and stood in front of the Summer Reading for Teens table. As she began talking about the books in the store, I watched the summer school students. Most of the girls were paying attention and looking over the books on the table. The boys' eyes were wandering elsewhere and most of them looked like they wanted to be somewhere -- anywhere -- else.

What message do we send boys when we load up a table of books for teens with titles that so many of them do not connect with? Is summer reading supposed to be fun? Do we assume that boys won't read for fun? Do we assume boys don't read -- period?

Years ago, I took a workshop from Jane Yolen, the acclaimed writer of books for children. She said, "We don't have enough books that reflect the genuine interests of boys." That was true 15 years ago. It is still true now.As a writer who visits many schools, I'm always stuck by the enthusiasm of students in a first-grade class who are learning to read. The marks on the page are a secret code: Excitement and concentration are evident as students decipher it. When they do, words and sentences appear and their world is altered forever

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Tom Sweeney, Star Tribune

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On a recent bookstore visit, a sign caught my eye: "Summer Reading for Teens." As an author of young adult novels, I was curious to see what books were selected for the table.

Fashionistas, mean girls, gossip girls, island girls, it girls, a whole sisterhood of traveling pants. Had I read the sign wrong? Was this the table of summer reading for girls? I checked the sign again: Summer Reading for Teens. I scanned the table. Where were the books for boys? Among the brightly colored covers, not a single book featured a male protagonist in a contemporary setting.

What would a male teen think about this table? Probably that summer reading didn't include him.

Just then a group of high school students came in with their teacher. A store employee greeted them and stood in front of the Summer Reading for Teens table. As she began talking about the books in the store, I watched the summer school students. Most of the girls were paying attention and looking over the books on the table. The boys' eyes were wandering elsewhere and most of them looked like they wanted to be somewhere -- anywhere -- else.

What message do we send boys when we load up a table of books for teens with titles that so many of them do not connect with? Is summer reading supposed to be fun? Do we assume that boys won't read for fun? Do we assume boys don't read -- period?

Years ago, I took a workshop from Jane Yolen, the acclaimed writer of books for children. She said, "We don't have enough books that reflect the genuine interests of boys." That was true 15 years ago. It is still true now.

As a writer who visits many schools, I'm always stuck by the enthusiasm of students in a first-grade class who are learning to read. The marks on the page are a secret code: Excitement and concentration are evident as students decipher it. When they do, words and sentences appear and their world is altered forever.

Yet, if you see these same students four years later and ask them how they feel about reading, a number will say they don't like to read. Some of these fifth-graders will tell you directly that they hate reading. Of this last group, almost all are boys.

Think about this: If you tried to devise an educational system whose main goal was to change the enthusiasm of first-grade boys into a dislike of reading in four years, could you create a system more effective than the one we have now?

We have done boys a fundamental disservice by failing to publish more books that address their genuine interests. Go into any classroom and ask boys what they like to do. Make a list and then take that down to the library and see how many chapter books and novels you can find on these topics. The gap is huge

alexie.website - "This is not a silent movie.�Our voices will save our lives"

alexie.website - "This is not a silent movie.�Our voices will save our lives".

This is a supplemental website for book Sherman Alexie in the Classroom: "This is not a silent movie. Our voices will save our lives." The complete book is available from NCTE.

Works by Sherman Alexie

Additional Resources for Teaching for Social Justice and Native American Issues

Additional Resources for Reading and Teaching Native Literatures

Introduction to Native American Literatures by Heather Bruce (PDF) HTML Version

Taking a Critical Stance: excerpts from professional essays about Alexie's work

Introducing Theoretical Frameworks Student Work Table of Contents

Notes on Teaching Sherman Alexie Authors

SHERMAN ALEXIE'S OFFICIAL SITE www.fallsapart.com

NCTE Inbox Blog: Google Lit Trips: Literary Maps Meet 21st Century Literacy Skills

NCTE Inbox Blog: Google Lit Trips: Literary Maps Meet 21st Century Literacy Skills. Traci Gardner, NCTE

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Google Lit Trips: Literary Maps Meet 21st Century Literacy Skills

This summer, I’m exploring a variety of Web sites and tools that you can use in the classroom and/or for your own professional development. Each week, I’ll talk about how it works, point out related sites, and discuss classroom connections.

This week, I focus on using Google Earth to create 21st Century Literary Maps. Looking for ways to combine digital literacy skills, research, literary study, reading and writing for the web, and more?

All you need is Google Lit Trips! This one tool can provide cross-curricular connections, literary exploration, and 21st century literacy skills. It’s simple. Literary Maps Google Earth = a great classroom resource!

Literary maps were a highlight of NCTE’s Annual Convention last November. In case you’re unfamiliar, a literary map shows locations related to a piece of literature, the life of an author, or literary locations in a particular place (e.g., all the authors born in a state). When NCTE first began inviting affiliates to bring literary maps to convention, the maps were typically made of poster or display board, like those shown in the 1994 English Journal article “The Making of a Literary Map.” The maps included in Google Lit Trips show what happens when literary maps are plotted out online, on the backdrop of the satellite maps that comprise Google Maps.

Outlines for Conceptual Units

Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia, has created an excellent resource site of units designed for use in teaching English, particularly in the literature class.

Outlines for Conceptual Units.

If you would like to recommend additional titles for this list, please send the title, author, and appropriate unit to [email protected]. If you have a whole outline (texts and key concepts and problems) for a unit not listed here, please send it along as well, and I'll be happy to credit you. And if you have any Handy Links that I've overlooked, I'd be grateful if you'd share them with me. Thanks! Also: Please keep in mind that this project is a work in progress. Some of the units--or perhaps all of them--are still under construction.

I always appreciate your comments and suggestions on how to improve and expand them. This page provides outlines for conceptual units of instruction of the sort found in the Virtual Library of Conceptual Units. For each unit I provide a set of possible texts and a possible conceptual focus.

Keep in mind that my intention here is to suggest possibilities rather than to prescribe a curriculum; there are many other units that you could develop, and different texts and focuses for each of the units that I outline. The lists of texts are intended to be responsive to a range of readers in terms of age, reading ability, interests, and so on, so that the unit themes could be adapted to readers of different grade levels, communities, etc. The lists include both canonical works and less familiar texts, including literature, film, and popular music. There are far more texts listed than you would ever teach in any single unit; rather, the idea is to provide an idea of what is possible for teaching a particular theme.

I would always hope that any teacher using these lists would use her own knowledge and imagination to make the instruction work for her own students and circumstances. I've also tried to make this site as versatile as possible. In addition to the links to websites related to the various themes, I've linked (when possible) each text to an online version so that you can preview the literature when considering possibilities. I've further provided links to images and news stories that fit with each unit focus. And wherever possible, I link themes to teen writing available on the web.

Online Instructor's Guide for Smagorinsky, P. (2008). Teaching English by design: How to create and carry out instructional units. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Reading Report Says: Books In, Kindle Out | Used Books Blog

Reading Report Says: Books In, Kindle Out | Used Books Blog.

« The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Reading Report Says: Books In, Kindle Out The 2008 Kids and Family Reading Report by Yankelovich and Scholastic contains some interesting statistics that may provide insight about the future of books in the digital age.

* 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, "€œNo matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper."

* 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

Those are some pretty shocking(ly good) statistics given the prevalence of online media and handheld devices. I'€™ve blogged previously that eBooks and the Kindle have an uphill battle because of the passive nature of books and the lack of a motivating agent of change for the medium. Books are already portable, can be printed in color, and don’t get better due to new technology (e.g. - Dolby or HD.) To be fair, there does seem to be a place for digital books.

* Two thirds of kids age 9-17 believe that within the next 10 years, most books which are read for fun will be read digitally either on a computer or on another kind of electronic device. Eighty-seven percent of kids think people will be able to tag and share their favorite parts of books with others. So perhaps there is room for both eBooks and the musty regular old book. The problem may be whether the digital book market can be a large enough and viable business.

Ready for some more good news?

* A majority of kids say they like to read books for fun and that reading books for fun is important. Most kids perceive a correlation between reading and success.

* One in four kids age 5-17 reads books for fun every day (high frequency reader), and more than half of kids read books for fun at least two to three times a week.

A part of me doesn't believe these statistics given all the doom and gloom you often hear about reading and literacy. But the study was done to a 90% confidence level. It’s gratifying to see books still being linked to success.

The U.S. Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), which tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade, showed a correlation between the number of books in a child’s home and their test scores. This was referenced in Freakonomics and also cause for some sniping regarding correlation versus causality. The crux of the report was this finding:

* A child with at least 50 kids'€™ books in his home, for instance, scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 percentile points higher than a child with 50 books. Yet, there was no correlation between a parent reading to the child and test scores. This led many to believe that books, and the number of books, in the home wasn’t the primary factor, but instead was linked to the parent’s income and education.

I find that a weak argument for a couple of reasons. The first being the difference in scores between 50 books and 100 books. If you believe this argument, then the parents of the 100 book group are richer and better educated than those in the 50 book group. I’d be surprised if this was the case. It would have been a major finding in the report had this been true.

The second reason is that the environment has so much to do with a child’s growth and development. Akin to the Montessori idea of the prepared environment, it makes sense that having books around greatly increases the chance that they’ll seek them out on their own.

Parents reading to their child might not be correlated to success, but having access to books for children to seek out and explore on their own makes sense. You could be rich and intelligent parents, but if you’re feeding your kids a diet of Halo 3 on a daily basis you might get some odd results.

So how am I linking these two reports together? I know, it seems like a stretch, right? Here'€™s how.

* Most kids say there are not enough really good books for boys/girls their age, and they say finding books they like is one of the key reasons they do not read for fun more frequently. This important statement comes from The Reading Report, making it clear that finding books is a key to reading. The odds of you finding books is far higher if you've got them in your home. The Reading Report goes on to show the dramatic effect Harry Potter had on reading habits and attitudes.

Again, I€'d offer up the question: would a child be more or less likely to read Harry Potter if the books were in the home? Yeah, parents, buy more books.

About Scholastic: News

About Scholastic: News.

NEW STUDY: KIDS AGE 5-17 BELIEVE TECHNOLOGY WILL SUPPLEMENT – NOT REPLACE – BOOK READING AND SAY THEY WILL ALWAYS WANT TO READ BOOKS PRINTED ON PAPER New York, NY (June 11, 2010) -- A new study released today finds that 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, no matter what I can do online, I'll always want to read books printed on paper, and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

The Kids & Family Reading Report, a national survey of children age 5-17 and their parents, also found that kids who go online to extend the reading experience – by going to book or author websites or connecting with other readers – are more likely to read books for fun every day.

The 2008 Kids & Family Reading Report, a follow up to a similar 2006 study, both of which were conducted by Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, and TSC, a division of Yankelovich, a leader in consumer trends research, again found that the time kids spend reading books for fun declines after age eight and continues to drop off through the teen years.

"This year, we wanted to investigate the role technology plays in the drop-off in reading books for fun after age eight, and what we found surprised us,"€ said Heather Carter, Director of Corporate Research, Scholastic. Despite the fact that after age eight, more children go online daily than read for fun daily, high frequency Internet users are more likely to read books for fun every day. That suggests that parents and teachers can tap into kids’ interest in going online to spark a greater interest in reading books.

The study also found that two-thirds of kids age 9-17 who go online have extended the reading experience via the Internet. These online reading extenders say they learn what other people think about a book, learn new things about an author and connect with other readers. "Kids are very forward-thinking about ways technology can complement book reading," said Kristen Harmeling, Senior Researcher at Yankelovich. "They envision a time when most books are read digitally and when they can tag and share parts of books with other people online, making online reading a gateway to social activities; yet they still want printed books."

One in four kids age 5-17 say they read books for fun every day and more than half of kids say they read books for fun at least two to three times a week. One of the key reasons kids say they don’t read more often is that they have trouble finding books they like – a challenge that parents underestimate. Kids who struggle to find books they like, are far less likely to read for fun daily or even twice a week.

The 2008 Kids & Family Reading Report also found that parents have a strong influence over kids'€™ reading. They overwhelmingly view reading as the most important skill a child needs to develop, but only about half of all parents begin reading to their child before their first birthday. The percent of children who are read to every day drops from 38% among 5-8 year olds to 23% among 9-11 year olds. This is the same time that kids’ daily reading for fun starts to decline. "Parent engagement in their child's reading from birth all the way through the teen years can have a significant impact on how often their children read and how much they enjoy reading,"€ added Carter.