No description available.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Baylor University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-96).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Language, Culture and Teaching. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-220). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99164

The purpose of the study was to determine whether tenth grade adolescents can exhibit the three goals of bibliotherapy, identification, catharsis, and insight, thus achieving self-discovery, through reading contemporary adolescent novels and discussing them with their English teacher on an individualistic basis. Six subjects, four girls and two boys, were selected from two tenth grade English classes at Anderson High School, Anderson, Indiana. The students were given two literary attitude surveys: "Questionnaire: Responses to Feminine Characters in Literature" and "Literary Transfer and Interest in Reading Literature," as pre-tests and post-tests. The six subjects, selected on the basis of average or better grades as well as demonstrated maturity and responsibility, read' Confessions of a Teenage Baboon by Paul Zindel, Don't Look and it Won't Hurt by Richard Peck, The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katharine Paterson, My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel, The Pistachio Prescription by Paula Danziger, and That Was Then, This Is Now by S. E. Hinton. The students discussed each book in a specific order in a private, tape-recorded session with their English teacher, the researcher, who asked predetermined questions over each book. After the tape-recorded discussions were transcribed, the responses were identified as examples of identification (ID), catharsis (C), and insight (IN).Findings1. Identification with fictional characters can lead to insights by adolescents not only about the characters but also about their own personal lives.2. The number of insights did not increase as more books were read.3. In this study the girls appeared to achieve more identification and to gain more insights than the boys.4. Catharsis is the one goal of bibliotherapy less frequently experienced, but the more an adolescent becomes emotionally involved in a book, the more likely he is to experience catharsis.5. Adolescents can achieve self-discovery if they are given the opportunity to discuss fictional characters and situations as related to their own concerns with teachers who can take the time to do so.Conclusions1. Bibliotherapy on an individual basis with adolescent novels not only has emotional and personal benefits but also academic value in that students will respond more readily and responsibly to literature within the realm of their own experience than to the traditional literature of classroom anthologies.2. Emotional maturity and self-discovery can occur if educators are willing to individualize and humanize education.3. Bibliotherapy with adolescent novels can engender feelings of mutual trust and respect between teachers and their students, who need the opportunity to discuss their feelings and problems with adults whom they perceive care about them.4. The individualized approach to bibliotherapy can provide more thorough and genuine responses, leading to significant conclusions.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--ha-Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit bi-Yerushalayim, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-342).

No description available.

Authors augment their texts using devices such as bold and italic typeface to signal important information to the reader. These typographical text signals are an example of a signal designed to have some affect on others. However, some signals emerge through the unplanned, indirect, and collective efforts of a group of individuals. Paths emerge in parks without having been designed by anyone. Objects accumulate wear patterns that signal how others have interacted with the object. Books open to important, well studied pages because the spine has worn, for example (Hill, Hollan, Wroblewski, & McCandless, 1992). Digital text and the large-scale collaboration made possible through the internet provide an opportunity to examine how unplanned, collaborative text signals could emerge. A software application was designed, called CoREAD, that enables readers to highlight sections of the text they deem important. In addition, CoREAD adds text signals to the text using font colour, based on the group's collective history and an aggregation function based on self-organising systems. The readers are potentially influenced by the text signals presented by CoREAD but also help to modify these same signals. Importantly, readers only interact with each other indirectly through the text. The design of CoREAD was greatly inspired by the previous work on history-enriched digital objects (Hill & Hollan, 1993) and at a more general level it can be viewed as an example of distributed cognition (Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000). / Forty undergraduate students read two texts on topics from psychology using CoREAD. Students were asked to read each text in order to write a summary of it. After each new student read the text, the text signals were changed to reflect the current group of students. As such, each student read the text with different text signals presented. / The data were analysed for each text to determine if the text signals that emerged were stable and valid representations of the semantic content of the text. As well, the students' summaries were analysed to determine if students who read the text after the text signals had stabilised produced better summaries. Three methods demonstrated that CoREAD was capable of generating stable typographical text signals. The high importance text signals also appeared to capture the semantic content of the texts. For both texts, a summary made of the high signals performed as well as a benchmark summary. The results did not suggest that the stable text signals assisted readers to produce better summaries, however. Readers may not respond to these collaborative text signals as they would to authorial text signals, which previous research has shown to be beneficial (Lorch, 1989). The CoREAD project has demonstrated that readers can produce stable and valid text signals through an unplanned, self-organising process.

An iterative case-study approach was used in this investigation of reading processes used by mature experienced readers. Six retired schoolteachers (aged 55 plus) were interviewed to obtain comprehensive data on their reading interests, attitudes, and life long reading habits. A combination of modified cloze and guided introspection procedures were used to examine the reading behaviours exhibited across multiple and varied texts. / Scoring procedures were developed which considered sentence, partial text, and whole text level acceptability of modified cloze responses. As well, a framework which considered whether responses were mainly text-based or knowledge-based was developed for analyzing the guided introspection data. / Results indicated that although attitudes towards reading were constant across total lifespan, reasons for reading and reading interests changed. Differences in processes used to comprehend text were apparent across both subjects and texts. Subjects exhibited similar sentence and partial text scores, but whole text level scores differed. Guided introspection protocols indicated mainly interactive response processing rather than either text-based or knowledge-based processing. Mode of processing changed across texts depending on reader interest in text topics. / Results indicated the value of the iterative case-study design for obtaining intensive data on reading processes. As well, the procedures developed for collecting and analyzing data were useful for examining how readers construct and reconstruct meaning as they read.

No description available.

This thesis is about a problem of interest to reading theorists, psychological anthropologists and cultural studies researchers alike: why we find some narratives, plots, and images compelling and what this phenomenon can tell us about the cultural bases of human motivation. Gesturing to the interdependence of emotion, cognition, and motivation, the notion of the '(dis)positioned self' is proposed as a conceptual tool by which to address how motivation is both acquired and expressed in the way the self as 'feeling-mind' reads, that is, negotiates an interpretation of the signifying systems of a text to render it personally meaningful. (Dis)position allows us to overcome the sociocultural determinism of French structuralist and some poststructuralist reductions of the self to a precipitate of cultural constructs by reconceptualizing the interpreting self as an embodied, affective agent who employs unconscious knowledge that itself draws on another form of sociality. On this account, reading performance is culturally informed action and interpretations are motivated. Emotion is introduced as symptomatic of the intrapsychic investments which mediate how readers internalize cultural knowledge. The thesis looks at three soundings from social discourse--Janice Radway's Reading the Romance; The Singing Detective, a contemporary metafictional text; and the literature and group therapy practices associated with the codependency movement--in order to examine how presuppositions about emotion and the psychical reality of fantasy appear in cultural representations of the 'ill self as reader' while being fundamental to psychological notions of the self upon which healing practices themselves depend for their efficacy.