Reading Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Two Revolutions: Teaching History in Fourth Semester Russian

In my talk, I will present some of the materials I have made for an interdisciplinary intermediate Russian cultural curriculum, intended to combine the study of literature and film with historical readings. I will discuss challenges of preparing intermediate Russian students to read complex non-fictional texts, focusing especially on the following three areas: the choice…

Lecture by Carl Blyth, September 19, 2014

Digital Social Reading: Textual Interpretation as Collaborative Activity Carl Blyth, Department of French & Italian, University of Texas at Austin Current e-reading devices allow multiple readers to read the same text together, annotate the text and to share their annotations. The resulting practice is referred to as digital social reading. This new literacy practice violates…

Workshop & Lecture by Elizabeth Bernhardt, March 10, 2006

Workshop: What do we know about (literature) reading proficiency in a second language?   Lecture: Foreign languages surviving and thriving in conventional university settings by Elizabeth Bernhardt, Professor of German, and Stanford Language Center, Director, Stanford University, California WORKSHOP: This workshop will focus on second-language reading proficiency with a specific emphasis on upper-level expository and…

Lecture by Dorothy Chun, November 9, 1999

Web-Based Language Instruction: Enhanced Multi-Media Learning Environment or Cognitive Overload? by Dorothy Chun, Associate Professor of German , University of California at Santa Barbara.

Results in L2 Journal Articles

Unraveling the Affordances of ‘Silas Marner’ in a Japanese University EFL Context

Graded readers, simplified versions of literature and other texts at graduated levels of difficulty, are widely employed in contexts of foreign language pedagogy and are widely considered to be a form of written-language input ostensibly suitable for a wide array of developmental stages. However, the efficacy of graded readers is not unchallenged, among which criticisms is that the language in a graded work of literature is, by nature, aesthetically inert and inauthentic, in comparison to the original. Still, from an L2 literacies-development perspective, could one not justifiably accept that aesthetic impoverishment and inauthenticity are reasonable, perhaps also unavoidable, compromises? Practically, what, for example, could a typical intermediate-level ...

Textual Borrowing and Perspective-Taking: A Genre-Based Approach to L2 Writing

This qualitative study explored the impact of reading on writing in a collegiate French culture course that emphasized genre-based writing pedagogy. In particular, the study focused on how 19 advanced collegiate learners of French used model text resources in writing a letter-manifesto and what their perceptions were of participation in genre-based writing instruction. Based on this study's findings, the authors make an argument for how genre-based pedagogy can facilitate ...