This study aims to explore the effect of extra-curricular English input for primary school learners in Taiwan, where English is spoken as a foreign language. Like many other countries, e. g. Japan, Korea and Mainland China, Taiwan started its primary English programme in the past ten years to improve English proficiency through an early start, yet there are reports of low achievement, slow progress and low parental satisfaction. A base-line and a pilot study showed that English learning in Taiwan is generally confined to the classroom and learners rarely receive input outside of school, apart from attending private language schools, which focus on cramming for exams. The main study considered extra-curricular input to increase the amount of exposure to English, which would be natural, enjoyable and accessible to children. This pointed to the use of English storybooks. The pilot study showed that young beginners need scaffolding in their learning, so the project involved parents to support reading with their children at home. Participants were sixty-three Taiwanese primary school pupils and their parents from three classes in one state school, with three subgroups: a family reading group, an independent reading group and a control group. The study period was one academic semester. Apart from the control group, pupils in the family reading group and the independent reading group were directed to read with or without their parents at home. The method of investigation used for this study was qualitative in the form of questionnaires, proficiency tests, reading records, interviews and audio recordings of family reading from that subgroup, and quantitative in the form of tasks designed to measure improvement in the learners' proficiency in terms of vocabulary and morpho-syntax. The results showed that learners who read more slightly outperformed the non-readers in terms of morpho-syntax. The audio recordings showing interaction of the parents and children during reading demonstrated that further help is necessary for such an idea to work in practice. This study also reveals the difficulty of arranging a time for home reading between the parents and children and, in addition, points to the insufficient exposure to English for these Taiwanese young learners in their daily lives, which will continue to contribute to their slow progress, despite their age advantage.

This thesis examines the reading lives of eighteenth-century English men and women. Diaries of the middling sort and the gentry show that reading entwined daily routines and long-term aspirations. This life-writing also demonstrates that readers performed and contextualised reading within a specific cultural milieu. Finally, autobiographical accounts reveal that books could challenge or reinforce contemporary constructs of gender. These three strands of readership-self, culture and gender-weave throughout the thesis. The first chapter is an analysis of the expectations for 'ideal reading'. Some advice literature attempted to dictate engagement with books, often warning of the 'dangers' of certain reading, particularly for women. While much historiography focuses on prescriptions of print culture, this thesis shows that practice did not live up to precept. Case studies of real readers present examples of proactive reading. A group of male 'occupational readers' relied on books for education and training, piety, sociability and the reckoning. of financial accounts. Propagandist Thomas Hollis gifted books in the 1750s and 1760s in order to influence collective political opinion through the reading of specific liberty texts, chosen according to his conception of masculine civic duty. Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Montagu devoted themselves to scholarly reading, which enabled exceptional authorial achievements in the second half of the century. From 1773 to 1830, Anna Larpent judged all her reading critically within a domestic setting, demonstrating an assiduous commitment to literary review. Finally, Anne Lister interpreted texts to reinforce her sense of social distinction and to facilitate her same-sex love affairs. This thesis provides critical new insights into the history of reading in the eighteenth century, showing that men and women, unrestricted by advice literature, hoped to gain a multiplicity of opportunities through active 'reading for life'.

This thesis considers the phenomenological experience of e-reading (reading on an electronic screen) as a way-in to discussing wider issues of technology and our encounter with objects in our environments. By considering the resistance shown toward reading on iPads and Kindles in popular and academic discourse as a source of valuable “folk phenomenological” report, this thesis hopes to shed light on both the particular engagement of portable e-reading and the general experience of embodied encounters with artefacts. The first chapter will consider the shortcomings of contemporary definitions of technology and aims to provide its own definition commensurate to the task of describing the intimate and very human encounter with equipment, an encounter which will be described as “technological.” In the second chapter an ontology (begun in the background of the first) will be developed which primarily considers our encounter with things that are as embodied as ourselves. This ontology sees evolution as an epistemological concern, with every evolutionary act occurring as a response to environmental pressures and producing a knowledge of that environment. This knowledge, it will be argued, in light of conclusions drawn from an engagement with Object Oriented Ontology, can be tested only via repeatable successful action with that which might be known. Such evolutionary concerns, it will be further argued, are equally applicable to our artefacts. The third chapter will focus on metaphor and critical theory to consider how e-reading in particular might function as a material metaphor, enabling productive thought. It will conclude with readings of three texts which put the language of all three chapters to work. This thesis draws on several fields, including Critical Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Philosophy, the bringing together of which is intended to be of use to the still emerging Digital Humanities and the work's home discipline of English Studies as it gets used to the substantial alterations in the substrate of its object of study.