[etni] Interesting Take on 'Reading' (for ETNI site)

From: Margie Cohen <margiec@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: 'ETNI' <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:57:33 +0200
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It would be interesting to hear about the correlations (to the article
below)
 regarding  acquisition of English as a Foreign Language.
(David-pls. include the section after the article because it would also be
in interest to 
ETNI readers!)
February 1, 2009
The Medium

Click and Jane 

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/virginia_heffe
rnan/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
"Did you like this book?" asks the computer. It's a customer-satisfaction
question, but it seems more profound than that.
We hesitate. Ben, my 3-year-old son, shoots me a puzzled look. The answer
should be yes. Ben enjoys what's on the screen right now: Starfall, an
online medley of free learn-to-read activities. But he doesn't like the
question.
"It's not a book," he explains, emphatically, to the laptop. "It's more like
a movie or a video." 
Oh, God. I knew it. 
In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books -
PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books - but even a child knows the difference.
Reading books is an operation with paper. Playing games on the Web is
something else entirely. I need to admit this to myself, too. I try to
believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable,
hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But
maybe it's just not reading at all. Just as screens aren't books.
I kind of like that Ben is not remotely fooled by Starfall's booklike
graphics. The site is loaded with all kinds of biblio-iconography: title
pages, tables of contents, frontispieces, page numbers and covers. But, to
him, nothing that plays on a screen is a book. And though 20th-century
critics like Roland Barthes encouraged readers to see textual experience as
play, it's quite possible that nothing that plays is a book. 
In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write
that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school
tests than those who grow up with fewer books. But they also contend that
reading aloud to children and limiting their TV time has no correlation with
success on tests. If both of these observations hold, it's worth determining
what books really are, the better to decisively decorate with them. The
widespread digitization of text has complicated the matter. Will Ben benefit
if I load my Kindle with hundreds of books that he can't see? Or does he
need the spectacle of hard- and softcover dust magnets eliminating floor
space in our small apartment to get the full "Freakonomics" effect? I sadly
suspect he needs the shelves and dust. 
Anyway, Ben doesn't distinguish between my Kindle and a BlackBerry. My
immersion in the Kindle is not (to him) an example of impressive role-model
literacy. It's Mom e-mailing, or texting, or for all he knows playing video
games. In fact, the only time he describes what he and I do together as
"reading" is when we're sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers,
open in front of us like a hymnal.
Starfall, a lovably cluttered site, includes games (match "d" with a picture
of a drum) with its offerings, and perhaps the proximity of these games to
the site's "books" (artless plot summaries called "The Wooden Horse" or "The
Little Red Hen") is what leads to a category error. But there's also the
pesky fact that the pictures in Starfall's would-be picture books tend to
fidget. They're animated. Something about an audience of kids apparently
makes it hard for authors to refrain from animating: if an image for
children can be made to dance around, it usually does.
One More Story, a subscription-only online children's library that first
appeared in 2005, takes exception to this treatment of images. The site,
which maintains a sublicensing arrangement with 13 publishers, offers only
picture books that have already been published. It does not use cartoons of
any kind. You can find "The Snowy Day" on One More Story, as well as "The
Poky Little Puppy" and "Stellaluna." "The books are never animated," Carl
Teitelbaum, a onetime "Sesame Street" contributor who created the site,
explained to me by e-mail message. "We do not alter the text or the
illustrations at all."
But One More Story also demonstrates that - as Barthes and his fellow
critics might have put it - every translation entails a reworking. It's
impossible to render books as pixels without making changes. "We do take the
text out of the page and place it in a text box in a size type that children
can easily follow," Teitelbaum conceded. Moreover, voice-over is added, so a
child can have a book read to him. 
One More Story does not use facsimiles of the lettering in a book, even if a
book is hand-lettered or idiosyncratically lettered. Nonetheless, Teitelbaum
explained: "We try to match the typeface with the typeface in the book so
going to the actual books will be a smooth transition. We sometimes go in
for close-ups, the way your eye might, when the text refers to a portion of
the illustration." Hmm. All this reconceptualization, and scoring and even
sound effects: sounds like filmmaking to me. 
And yet. While some movie devices show up on One More Story, great pains are
taken to preserve - even enhance - the booklike feel of the works in the
online library. The gutter of the book is shown, the pages are slightly
curved and shadows are used to create an impression of depth. It's kind of
funny to go to the trouble to radically reconceive a book for new
distribution and display, only to have to add back some of its humblest
physical qualities. "This realistic portrayal is very intentional,"
Teitelbaum explained. "When a child has a positive experience, we want that
child to know that they have just read a book, not seen a cartoon or video
game."
I'd like that, too. I'd like for Ben to sit with One More Story and come
away with the impression that he'd been read beautiful books all afternoon.
But Ben tends to ask for One More Story when he wants privacy, the same
state of mind in which he likes videos. Books, by contrast, are for when he
feels snuggly. 
Which brings up something significant about books for a 3-year-old: whatever
else preschool reading is, it's intimate. Before you can read, you get to
see books mostly when you're cuddled up with an adult or jostling with other
kids in a circle. In one significant sense, then, One More Story may be
closer to true reading than even the ink-on-paper books (with real gutters!)
that I read aloud: Ben can do it himself. As he maneuvers the computer
trackpad and he shoos me away so he can study (for the 10th time) "Sidney
Won't Swim" on One More Story, I'm not sure he's developing an appreciation
for books. But he is learning how to enrich his solitude, and that is one of
the most intensely pleasurable aspects of literacy. 
Post <http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/click-and-jane/#respond>
a Comment at The Medium 
__________
POINTS OF ENTRY
This Week's Recommendations
FREE-FOR-ALL: In early-childhood education, nothing is underthought. Except,
refreshingly, Starfall <http://www.starfall.com/> . The eccentric, cheerful
learn-to-read site is loaded with scattershot activities. Some of them are
great - the "D" sequence in the opening alphabet is curiously effective -
while some miss the mark. (The Groundhog Day game
<http://www.starfall.com/n/holiday/groundhogsday/load.htm?f&n=main>  is
plain weird.) All told, though, the site is fun, free and - see for yourself
- effective.
UPSCALE: For a more elegant, more serious and more expensive early-reading
experience, try One More Story <http://www.onemorestory.com/> , the
subscription-only online library. For $44 a year, you get a sparkling-clean
interface, acclaimed tried-and-true picture books, lovely narration and a
glitch-free player.
JOUISSANCE: Nothing like teaching someone to read to make you wonder what
reading really is. Turn your adult phonics skills onto the great 1973
breakthrough "The <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pleasure_of_the_Text>
Pleasure of the Text," by Roland Barthes, and revisit the argument that
rapture lies in making meaning of written language. Find a battered
grad-school copy chock-full with marginalia on AbeBooks.com
<http://www.AbeBooks.com>  for about $10, including shipping.
 




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[etni] Interesting Take on 'Reading' (for ETNI site)

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