This thesis investigates the impact of transportation — the phenomenon of “being miles away” while receiving a narrative — on audience response. The poetics of narrative reception within the Homeric epics are described and the correspondences with the psychological concept of transportation are used to suggest the appropriateness and utility of this theory to understanding audience responses in and to the Iliad and Odyssey. The ways in which transportation complements and extends some concepts of narrative reception familiar to Homeric studies (the Epic Illusion, Vividness, and Enchantment) are considered, as are the ways in which the psychological theories might be adjusted to accommodate Homeric epic. A major claim is drawn from these theories that transportation fundamentally affects the audience’s interpretation of and responses to the narrative; this claim is tested both theoretically and empirically in terms of ambiguous characterization of Odysseus and the Kyklōps Polyphēmos in the ninth book of the Odyssey. Last, some consideration is given to the ways in which the theory (and its underlying empirical research) might be extended.

<p>Learning styles have been the subject of educational discussion since 1967. The Dunn and Dunn model has been world leading ever since. The Dunn and Dunn theory states that each individual learns differently and that school can help the students’ results by adapting the teaching to each student’s learning style and perceptual preference. This study focuses on learning styles and especially its connection to reading. When, where and why a student chooses to read is of importance and can affect the reading outcome. To get insight into how students read, this study looks at what type of setting students choose to read in when they do not read in school. It also examines students’ attitudes. The study also discusses how learning style-based learning can help teachers in their work.</p>

Learning styles have been the subject of educational discussion since 1967. The Dunn and Dunn model has been world leading ever since. The Dunn and Dunn theory states that each individual learns differently and that school can help the students’ results by adapting the teaching to each student’s learning style and perceptual preference. This study focuses on learning styles and especially its connection to reading. When, where and why a student chooses to read is of importance and can affect the reading outcome. To get insight into how students read, this study looks at what type of setting students choose to read in when they do not read in school. It also examines students’ attitudes. The study also discusses how learning style-based learning can help teachers in their work.

Introduction: The development of thinking skills is increasingly evolving as the one most important goals of formal primary and secondary education. Storybook reading is a well-established routine in early learning classrooms ranging from early preschool to foundation phase. As these interactions can typically be quite rich in exchanges and inquiry, the impact of book reading routines is significant, particularly as reading to young children plays a significant role in preparing them for later schooling. Aim: To describe how teachers interact during storybook reading with Grade R children. Methods: This study investigated five teacher’s interactions during storybook reading with their grade R (reception) classes in rural Zululand. The teachers were videotaped during 3 storybook reading sessions, these interactions were translated, transcribed and coded. Results and analysis: The results indicated that all five teachers interacted with the children throughout the storybook reading procedure. The teachers used a number of techniques that were suggested by researchers to increase oral language gains, emergent literacy gains and high cognitive thinking skills. Although teachers mainly used low cognitively challenging utterances, it was found that the teachers who gave the children the focus of control in the session, produced more high cognitively challenging utterances. The unfamiliar book was found to produce a higher percentage of high cognitive level utterances and teachers, who focused, not only on the story itself but on other concepts, produced more high level cognitive utterances. In general teachers seemed to favor requesting of information as a method of interaction and the highest percentage of high cognitive utterances, were found during the after reading period. Directions for intervention and for future research are discussed in light of the results. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC) / Unrestricted

The art of reading and its application to knowledge acquisition and innovation by elites have been largely neglected by historians of print culture and reading in late imperial China (1368-1911). Unlike most studies, which are concerned more with the implied reader and individual reading experience, the present study assumes that the actual reader and the social, cultural and epistemic dimensions of reading practices are the central issues of a history of reading in China. That is, while the art of reading was internalized by the individual, his learning and application of it had social, cultural and epistemic features. At a time when secular reading practices in Renaissance England were informed by Erasmian principles, Ming literati, regardless of their different philosophical stances, were being trained in an art of reading proposed by Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose Neo-Confucian philosophy had been esteemed as orthodox since the fourteenth century. Transformations and challenges in interpreting and applying his art did not hinder its general reception among elite readers. Its common employment determined the practitioner’s epistemic frame and manner of knowledge innovation. My dissertation consists of five chapters bracketed with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter One discusses Zhu’s theory of reading and the implied pattern of acquiring and innovating knowledge, based on a careful reading of his writings and conversations. Chapter Two describes the transmission of Zhu’s theory from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. During its transmission, Zhu’s art was reedited, rephrased, and even readapted by both government agencies and individual authors with different intentions and agendas. Chapter Three focuses on the reception of Zhu’s theory of reading by 1500 and argues that the moral end of reading eventually triumphed over the intellectual one in early Ming Confucian philosophy. Chapter Four explores the affinity of Ming philosophers of mind with Zhu’s theory in their reading concepts and practices from 1500 to the mid-seventeenth century. Despite their attempts to separate themselves intellectually from the Song tradition, Ming philosophers of mind followed Zhu’s rules for reading in their intellectual practices. Chapter Five outlines the reading habits and knowledge landscape based on a statistical survey of extant Ming imprints. Despite some deviations, the Ming reading habits and knowledge framework largely accorded with Zhu’s theory and its Ming adaptations. The continuity of reading habits from Zhu’s time to the seventeenth century, I conclude, inspires us to rethink the Ming apostasy from the Song tradition. The particularity of scholarly knowledge acquisition and innovation in Ming-Qing China by the eighteenth century was not invented by Ming-Qing scholars but anticipated by Zhu through his theory of reading. With respect to late imperial China, the history of reading, together with the history of knowledge, is yet to be fruitfully explored. With this dissertation, I hope to be able to make a contribution to the understanding of the East Asian orthodox habit of reading as represented by Zhu’s admirers. By placing my investigation in the context of the history of knowledge, I also hope to contribute to the understanding of the relationship of reading to the way that knowledge evolved in traditional China. Intellectual historians tended to consider the Ming Confucian tradition as having broken off from the Cheng-Zhu tradition, but at least in reading habits and practices Ming elite readers perpetuated Zhu’s theory of reading and the knowledge framework it implied.