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Reading Cultures (reading + culture)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	40%

Selected Abstracts

Reading Culture: Using Literature to Develop C2 Competence

FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 6 2002
Virginia M. Scott
The study compared the attitudes and performances of students who read a fact sheet about Côte d'Ivoire and the attitudes and performances of students who studied a poem about Côte d'Ivoire. We found that the students who read the fact sheet learned about the culture of Côte d'Ivoire in a rigid way that could foster stereotypes. Students who read the poem, on the other hand, explored their own feelings about the language and content of the poem. The study supports the notion that literary texts contribute to students' affective awareness and cognitive flexibility, and are therefore more effective for developing C2 competence. This study suggests ways to achieve the goals, articulated in the national standards, of fostering knowledge about and understanding of other cultures. [source]

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2001
David Samuels
In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911,81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture] [source]

Playing and resisting: rethinking young people's reading cultures

LITERACY, Issue 3 2008
Alex Kendall
In this paper I will argue that while young adult readers may often be represented through ,othering' discourses that see them as ,passive', ,uncritical' consumers of ,low-brow', ,throw-away' texts, the realities of their reading lives are in fact more subtle, complex and dynamic. The paper explores the discourses about reading, identity and gender that emerged through discussions with groups of young adults, aged between 16 and 19, about their reading habits and practices. These discussions took place as part of a PhD research study of reading and reader identity in the context of further education in the Black Country in the West Midlands. Through these discussions the young adults offered insights into their reading cultures and the ,functionality' of their reading practices that contest the kinds of ,distinction[s]' that tend to situate them as the defining other to more ,worthy' or ,valuable' reading cultures and practices. While I will resist the urge to claim that this paper represents the cultures of young adult readers in any real or totalising sense I challenge the kinds of dominant, reductive representations that serve to fix and demonise this group and begin to draw a space within which playfulness and resistance are alternatively offered as ways of being for these readers. [source]