‘When most I wink, then’ – what? Assessing the comprehension of literary texts in university students of English as a second language

This article introduces a test for literary text comprehension in university students of English as a second language. Poetry is especially suited for our purpose since it frequently shows features that offer challenges to comprehension in a limited space. An example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, on which our test is based: it is suited for assessing not only if a text has been understood but also the ability of respondents to reflect on their own comprehension skills. We show that the test’s psychometric properties are satisfactory, and we demonstrate its validity by analysing relevant external indicators. Thus, we can show a direct link between general reading experience and text comprehension as tested: the more students read, the better do they perform. The collaboration of literary studies with psychometrics moreover allows for a statistically valid identification of specific challenges to comprehension and thus advance our knowledge of what readers find difficult. This will be of interest not only in a hermeneutic and linguistic perspective but also with a view to addressing those difficulties in an educational context. For example, asking someone whether they have understood an utterance (in this case: a line of poetry) does not elicit reliable answers. Being able to say how one has established the meaning of a line seems to be a more reliable indicator of actually having understood it.

Book Review of "Elgara"; Conflict Analysis Through A Literary Psychology Perspective Approach.

This research was conducted as a form of attention to modern literary work. The researcher is interested in analyzing the novel Elgara. This study aims to be information based on the author's reading experience about the contents of this book and describe the novel's structure and the conflicts experienced by the main character in Elgara's novel. This paper is addressed to someone who has a great interest in modern literature, such as novels. This research collects data through literature review methods developed through a theoretical framework based on the literary psychology approach. The primary source data of this research gets from modern literary work entitled Elgara, written by Lusiafriaa and first published in August 2021. Based on the analysis results, This study shows that the novel Elgara has mixed plots, and two types of conflicts are internal and external. This research can conclude that researchers study the conflicts that occur to the Kyara's character in the novel Elgara using a literary psychology approach. Through the review of this novel, the author expects to bridge the gap between readers and literary works, increase the reader's love for literary works, and appreciate literary works

Absorbing narratives and Motivation to Read

Digital reading has established its position, and thus research on how reading mode affects reading experience and enjoyment is needed. This study is based on a reading experiment with 89 14–15-year-olds who read or listened to an entire book in four different reading modes: paperbook, ebook, audiobook, and via a commercial subscription service. Using quantitative methods, we examine whether reading mode affects story world absorption as well as seek connections between gender, motivation, absorption and reading mode preferences. Based on the study, reading mode has no statistical impact on narrative absorption experience, measured by the Story World Absorption Scale. Instead, the experience correlates with reading motivation; an adolescent with higher motivation is more likely to feel absorbed while reading, regardless of reading mode. On average, girls experience higher reading motivation and absorption than boys. Less motivated seem to prefer audiobook whereas more motivated choose reading over listening.

„Kocha, lubi, szanuje – nie chce, nie dba, żartuje”... Uczeń klasy pierwszej liceum i technikum w relacji do lektury obowiązkowej w szkole podstawowej (raport z diagnozy)

The article presents the results of a survey (concerning the reading experience of the canon) conducted among students of four first grades of secondary school (one grade of high school divided into elementary and advanced levels, and three classes of technical secondary school). The research was part of the initial diagnosis of the first and second year of graduates of the reformed primary school at the threshold of secondary school (in 2019/2020 and 2020/2021). Students declared reading compulsory reading books in grades 7–8 of primary school according to the scale: I have read all / excerpts / abstract / not at all / don’t remember. The results show not only the respondents’ reading preferences, but also their specific strategies of “acquiring” the content of the obligatory texts and their attitude towards compulsory reading in general. They also allow to pose questions about the literary competences of the graduates of the reformed elementary school at the start of the next stage of education. Scientific studies in the field of reading were used as a context, including the latest results of surveys among teachers on reading books by elementary school students prepared by Gdańskie Wydawnictwo Oświatowe (2020).

The Terms of the Text

Chapter 9 examines how unconventional written work is currently pushing the limits of our understanding of genre. Women from elsewhere are drawing from personal experience in order to disturb tired distinctions between “text” and “life” in imaginative fashions that reconfigure the reading experience. Their creative work is contributing to liberating these authors from overworked modes of expression and worn expectations, and allows them to break free from rigid definitions. It is significant that a number of worldwide women writers are now opting to compose works in a variety of creative forms ranging from the bande dessinée to the journal to the photo essay to récits of all sorts, expanding our conceptions of generic classification by playing with everything from titles to formats within the written work. This inventiveness includes a great deal of attention to visual arts and music, occasionally through the integration of works of art and musical notations in the text itself, and other times through allusions to artistic and musical pieces, or even through the construction of passages that liken literature to these other art forms. Authors are more and more impressively contributing to their own publishing profiles by writing “autobiographically” in variations that elude any clear categorization, but that reveal intimate details in texts that embody movement, progression, and development in exciting new terms.

O (nie tylko estetycznych) pożytkach z lektury fantastyki naukowej

The article is devoted to the potential benefits of a variety of natures from reading science fiction. They are divided into aesthetic and non-artistic, related to the functioning of this phenomenon in the congregational imagination, which models and at the same time is modelled by it. Given the properties of science fiction and its role in the reading circuit, one can conclude about the importance of science fiction as an artistic formula that approximates both the future and the dilemmas of the present, hidden in a futuristic stack of props (this is evident especially when reading socio-political fiction). At the same time, the reading experience contradicts such a high rating of science literature, most often – above – aspiring only to readily attractive “adventurials in space/cyberspace”. Indeed, if there are any advantages of reading science fiction, it must be realised, first of all, that they depend mainly on the expectations of the audience; their reading attitude (that is whether they will treat science fiction as a manifestation of literary escapism, or perhaps a medium of important socio-civilizational issues). However, readers who treat novels in an escapist way can be contrasted with those who equate it with the specific language of discourse over the present day. Therefore, it is important how the author will treat the chosen convention: as an excuse to present further “adventure in space”, or as an opportunity to look at the present from a special perspective, which is provided by the narrative future of action time of science fiction novels. Only then will it be possible to speak of the benefit of reading science fiction, which is more or less indirectly linked to the life of the reader.

Usage-Based Individual Differences in the Probabilistic Processing of Multi-Word Sequences

While it is widely acknowledged that both predictive expectations and retrodictive integration influence language processing, the individual differences that affect these two processes and the best metrics for observing them have yet to be fully described. The present study aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent to which experienced-based variables modulate the processing of word pairs (bigrams). Specifically, we investigate how age and reading experience correlate with lexical anticipation and integration, and how this effect can be captured by the metrics of forward and backward transition probability (TP). Participants read more and less strongly associated bigrams, paired in sets of four to control for known lexical covariates such as bigram frequency and semantic meaning (i.e., absolute control, total control, absolute silence, total silence) in a self-paced reading (SPR) task. They additionally completed assessments of exposure to print text (Author Recognition Test, Shipley vocabulary assessment, Words that Go Together task) and provided their age. Results show that both older age and lesser reading experience individually correlate with stronger TP effects. Moreover, TP effects differ across the spillover region (the two words following the noun in the bigram).

DELAMINATED CELLS FOR NANO-ENABLED INKJET PRINTABILITY

Nanometer scale cells delaminated from oil palm fruit bunch (EFB) microfiber cell walls were coated on commercial A4 and laboratory sheets prepared from virgin fibers. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) revealed the cells as translucent laminae of fibrils (TRX) bound together in a 5 nm to 100 nm thick web with dendritic edges. Coating of TRX onto the commercial A4 paper improved inkjet printability by up to 80%. The nano-enabled printability occurred as a summed effect of TRX forming (1) a canopy on or “loose-masking” of the protruding inorganic fillers, (2) capillary bridging of micro-voids formed by TRX fibrillary ends, (3) partial bridging of micro-gaps, (4) masking of the fiber surface, and (5) nano-grip arising from dendritic ends slipping into the micro-voids. The TRX-coated virgin pulp network revealed improved nano-enabled coverage by significantly reducing the stray and by print uniformity. The results provided an insight into the possibility of interfacing TRX with the paper surface for an improved inkjet print and economy through high-precision printing, also providing a pleasurable reading experience.

Reducing repetition in convolutional abstractive summarization

Convolutional sequence to sequence (CNN seq2seq) models have met success in abstractive summarization. However, their outputs often contain repetitive word sequences and logical inconsistencies, limiting the practicality of their application. In this paper, we find the reasons behind the repetition problem in CNN-based abstractive summarization through observing the attention map between the summaries with repetition and their corresponding source documents and mitigate the repetition problem. We propose to reduce the repetition in summaries by attention filter mechanism (ATTF) and sentence-level backtracking decoder (SBD), which dynamically redistributes attention over the input sequence as the output sentences are generated. The ATTF can record previously attended locations in the source document directly and prevent the decoder from attending to these locations. The SBD prevents the decoder from generating similar sentences more than once via backtracking at test. The proposed model outperforms the baselines in terms of ROUGE score, repeatedness, and readability. The results show that this approach generates high-quality summaries with minimal repetition and makes the reading experience better.

Investigating how we read translations

Since its inception, Translation Studies has hinged on theoretical concepts of effects and reception, with various reader-oriented notions such as equivalent effect, skopos, acceptability and adequacy, and user-centredness, to name but a few, having pervaded the discipline for decades. Despite this preoccupation with the phenomenology of translations, we still know very little about how translations are actually experienced – written translations especially. This article calls for an expansion of research into the reception and experience of source texts and their translations, reviewing the opportunities afforded by recent technological developments in eye-tracking, galvanic skin response sensors, echocardiogram monitors, and other multi-sensory devices. Using a short case study, a number of research questions and an outline of an experimental method are proposed to contrast the reading experience of two translations of the same source text, serving as a prompt for future research of this kind. By drawing inspiration from the few existing examples of research in this incipient paradigm and the considerations offered in the example, this article aims to stimulate future research to explore the vast untapped potential in this area and to arrive at a better understanding of the effects that different translation approaches yield and the potential variation in effects between source and target text.