In this study, I investigated the print exposure and website exposure of undergraduates in relation to their scores on a text comprehension test. Print exposure was measured with a national version of the author recognition test, whereas a new website recognition test was developed to measure students' exposure to texts on the internet. The…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

In an era of smart-phones, tablets and online gaming, it seems that a young person's motivation to pick up a book and start to read is relatively low. The article explores this claim by investigating the reading habits of a class of 23 female students at a single sex school in the south-east of England. The case-study particularly focuses on the…

Recent literary practices such as surface reading or the digital humanities have challenged the centrality of close reading in literary studies. Nonetheless, reading literature still involves sustained and productive attentiveness to texts. Fostering this skill, however, can seem increasingly difficult. From paper mills, to SparkNotes, to blogs…

This article examines how English as a foreign language learners might be better matched to reading texts using automatic readability analysis. Specifically, I examine how the lexical decoding component of readability might be validated. In Japan, readability has been mostly determined by publishers or by professional reading organizations who…

The growing expansion of Internet access and mass-scale usage of social networking platforms and search engines have forced digital newspapers to deal with challenges, amongst which are the need to constantly update news, the increasing complexity of sources, the difficulty of exercising their function as gatekeepers in a fragmented environment in…

Critics claim that digital technologies are killing reading, but these teacher-librarians have observed that teens are as excited about reading as they ever were. Online communities give these readers opportunities to get to know authors, communicate with other fans, and learn more about books of interest. Publishers and authors are responding to…

This paper focuses on students' reading habits--whether traditional reading habits (print books) or modern reading habits (using a computer screen). We review the changes in students' reading habits over time, as part of other global changes, and explore whether corresponding digital pedagogies have evolved to address these changes. We examine…

The purpose of this quantitative research study was to evaluate and determine if significant associations and linear correlations exist between reader socio-demographics, levels of trust and affinity in online citizen writer news story article content, brand loyalty, and acuity in newspaper organizations transitioning from print to online in a…

This paper focuses on the students' feedback after their participation in a WebQuest research project and aims to determine if the format of a WebQuest enhances student interest and engagement with a text compared to a traditional reading. It was hypothesized that students would respond favorably to this format, and that the increased engagement…

The "elaborate systems of communication" that historian Christopher Lasch observed nearly three decades ago have intensified in complexity and scope. The explosion of the Internet and wireless technologies has resulted in a dizzying proliferation of texts. Teachers and students are but a keystroke or mouse click away from a limitless stream of…

Last year, the author and his ninth-grade students explored ways to use mobile media devices such as iPods and cell phones to help guide literacy practices in their English classroom. Their school, South Central High School (SCHS; a pseudonym), is a public high school located in urban Los Angeles. As part of their seven-week exploration, the…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

The basic features of digital reading devices (such as the Amazon Kindle) are described in this article. The author also considers how such devices can advance e-book readership among primary students by offering new avenues for accessing and interacting with a wide array of texts. Rooted in the transactional theory of reader response and a new…

Given the challenging economic climate in the United States, many academics are looking to open-access electronic textbooks as a way to provide students with traditional textbook content at a more financially advantageous price. Open access refers to "the free and widely available information throughout the World Wide Web. Once an article's…