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Emergent-literacy skills are frequently taught within social interactions in preschool classrooms such as shared book reading. Children with impaired language and/or social engagement may have difficulty accessing these learning opportunities. Therefore, we sought to investigate the relationship between book-reading orientation during a teacher-led shared book reading activity and emergent-literacy skill development across three groups of preschool children; autism (n = 22), developmental language disorder (DLD; n = 23), and typical development (TD; n = 58). The children with autism demonstrated less book-reading orientation than their DLD and TD peers. Book-reading orientation was a significant predictor of residualized gains in print-concept knowledge and phonological awareness. Thus, book-reading orientation appears to play a critical role in preschooler's emergent-literacy skill development., Author(s): Allison F. Bean [sup.1] , Brenda I. Perez [sup.1] , Jaclyn M. Dynia [sup.2] , Joan N. Kaderavek [sup.3] , Laura M. Justice [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.261331.4, 0000 [...]

'March is Reading Month' (MiRM), also known as 'National Reading Month,' has become a fixture in districts nationwide. The practice of dedicating March to activities to encourage reading dates from [...]

According to the sexual script portrayed in romance novels, true love is demonstrated by being 'swept away' in passion. To the extent that this traditional romance script influences romance readers' own sexual scripts, readers may express greater reluctance to engage in precautionary sexual health behaviors, such as using condoms. We explored the relationship between women's reading of romance novels and their attitudes toward condom use, reports of past condom use, and intention to use condoms in the future. A systematic content analysis of modem romance novels documented the extremely low incidence of portrayals of condom use in initial sexual encounters. Study 1 demonstrated that high levels of romance reading were associated with negative attitudes toward condoms and reduced intent to use condoms in the future; Study 2 showed experimentally that including safe sex elements in romance stories increased positive attitudes toward condoms and marginally increased intent to use condoms in the future.

Reading can be seen as an orientation of the community of readers. A novel by Umberto Eco, 'Foucault's Pendulum,' can be used as an illustration. Successful literature offers a choice. It is possible to read looking for meanings or accept that some things have none, yet may be known. Literature is linked with desire and the possibility of knowing what cannot be explained, yet experienced at the level of the body. According to Jacques Lacan woman is the symptom of man, and there is something of the symptom in literature. In literary texts is found what could be called the cause of desire.

Disturbing texts can bring back childhood anxieties, which gives the reading experience special significance. If an adult reading experience is traumatic, it might be therapeutic, allowing the reader to overcome a childhood experience of being scared by a story or movie. Phobic texts might be as close as adults get to a latter-day cathartic experience, though initially it may seem like coming down with an illness. Perhaps readers are cleansed or purified, become better citizens. Some things lose their power to shock, to the detriment of society. Consciousness-raising can be a positive experience.

The nature of the pleasure derived from reading popular literature in the US prior to the Civil War is rarely studied because it is both difficult to empirically investigate and viewed as unworthy of scholarly inquiry. Society is still prejudiced against such pleasure, regarding it as a fundamentally unproductive form of emotion. A study of urban crime literature from the antebellum period shows that such accounts were eagerly devoured by readers because they fed a widespread and visceral ambivalence toward the productivity that was increasingly dominating city dwellers' lives and livelihoods.

About an hour ago, from the third floor window of the downtown library where I am writing this essay, I noticed a young man in a suit stop a passing [...]

Reading is a creative act in which the moment of stasis presented by the author is increased by the readers' response to the text. Henry Thoreau's 'Walden' asks readers to explore a project and the sense of completion achieved from it. The only constant in the book is the pond itself while everything else is changing. Similarly, the book should change with each reading because to trap 'Walden' within one interpretation would take it from an innovative, stimulating work to a part of tradition and conformity.

William Mayne's children's books are considered difficult because they use metafiction to increase reader responsibility to understand the text. The stories do not use a omniscient narrator to guide the readers' interpretations but rather provide suggestions for the process of interpretation through the thoughts and actions of individual characters. Mayne uses his stories to make readers question their presuppositions about literature, society and morality by making them analyze their own actions.

Reading teachers can do much to inculcate the reading habit in their students by reading and thereby encouraging reading. It is important for reading teachers to set aside prescribed curricula in favor of books and literature that students can really enjoy. Such books will have a lasting impact and create the desire to read in young children.