Exploring Topics and Genres in Storytime Books: A Text Mining Approach

Objective – While storytime programs for preschool children are offered in nearly all public libraries in the United States, little is known about the books librarians use in these programs. This study employed text analysis to explore topics and genres of books recommended for public library storytime programs. Methods – In the study, the researchers randomly selected 429 children books recommended for preschool storytime programs. Two corpuses of text were extracted from the titles, abstracts, and subject terms from bibliographic data. Multiple text mining methods were employed to investigate the content of the selected books, including term frequency, bi-gram analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Results – The findings revealed popular topics in storytime books, including animals/creatures, color, alphabet, nature, movements, families, friends, and others. The analysis of bibliographic data described various genres and formats of storytime books, such as juvenile fiction, rhymes, board books, pictorial work, poetry, folklore, and nonfiction. Sentiment analysis results reveal that storytime books included a variety of words representing various dimensions of sentiment. Conclusion – The findings suggested that books recommended for storytime programs are centered around topics of interest to children that also support school readiness. In addition to selecting fictionalized stories that will support children in developing the academic concepts and socio-emotional skills necessary for later success, librarians should also be mindful of integrating informational texts into storytime programs.

Sketch and Speak : An Oral, Written, and Graphic Expository Strategy Intervention for Secondary Students

Purpose This clinical focus article describes an intervention to improve comprehension, retention, and expression of the ideas and language of expository texts. Sketch and Speak intervention links written, graphic, and oral learning strategies through a triadic process of noting an idea simply with written or pictographic notes, then saying it fully, and saying it again. This simple routine engages transformational and retrieval cognitive processes involved in active learning and information retention. We consider the evidence base from the psychological and educational literature and report research evidence with younger students with language-related learning disabilities. We explain how to use Sketch and Speak with students in the secondary grades and suggest how to coach students toward independent, self-regulated use. Conclusions Students in the secondary grades benefit from learning strategies that help them gain control over the ideas and language of informational texts. Sketch and Speak may be a helpful addition to the speech-language pathologist's repertoire for older students with language and learning difficulties.

Automated Complexity Assessment of English Informational Texts for EFL Pre-service Teachers and Translators

Automated text complexity assessment tools are of enormous practical value in solving the time-consuming task of analyzing English informational texts for their complexity at the pre-reading stage. The present study depicts the application of the automated text analysis system the TextEvaluator as an effective tool that helps analyze texts on eight dimensions of text complexity as follows: syntactic complexity; academic vocabulary; word unfamiliarity; word concreteness; lexical cohesion; interactive style; level of argumentation; degree of narrativity, with further summarizing them with an overall genre-dependent complexity score. This research examines the complexity dimensions of English informational texts of four genres – legal, linguistic, news, and medical – that are used for teaching reading comprehension to EFL (English as a foreign language) pre-service teachers and translators at universities in Ukraine. The data obtained with the help of the TextEvaluator has shown that English legal texts are the most difficult for reading comprehension in comparison to linguistic, news, and medical texts. In contrast, medical texts are the least challenging out of the four genres compared. The TextEvaluator has provided insight into the complexity of English informational texts across their different genres that would be useful for assembling the corpora of reading passages scaled on specific dimensions of text complexity that predict text difficulty to EFL pre-service teachers and translators.

Automated Complexity Assessment of English Informational Texts for EFL Pre-service Teachers and Translators

Automated text complexity assessment tools are of enormous practical value in solving the time-consuming task of analyzing English informational texts for their complexity at the pre-reading stage. The present study depicts the application of the automated text analysis system the TextEvaluator as an effective tool that helps analyze texts on eight dimensions of text complexity as follows: syntactic complexity; academic vocabulary; word unfamiliarity; word concreteness; lexical cohesion; interactive style; level of argumentation; degree of narrativity, with further summarizing them with an overall genre-dependent complexity score. This research examines the complexity dimensions of English informational texts of four genres – legal, linguistic, news, and medical – that are used for teaching reading comprehension to EFL (English as a foreign language) pre-service teachers and translators at universities in Ukraine. The data obtained with the help of the TextEvaluator has shown that English legal texts are the most difficult for reading comprehension in comparison to linguistic, news, and medical texts. In contrast, medical texts are the least challenging out of the four genres compared. The TextEvaluator has provided insight into the complexity of English informational texts across their different genres that would be useful for assembling the corpora of reading passages scaled on specific dimensions of text complexity that predict text difficulty to EFL pre-service teachers and translators.

Scaffolding Inference-Making for Adolescents With Disabilities That Impact Reading

Middle grade students with disabilities that impact reading, including learning disabilities (LD) in reading, high functioning autism (ASD), emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), and students at-risk for reading failure due to the effects of poverty, often struggle to make knowledge-based inferences while reading informational texts. As a result, these populations of students are not able to read for understanding or learn from grade-level texts. Unfortunately, many special educators have had little preparation in how to develop their knowledge of inference-making or methods for explicitly teaching inference-making. Despite their lack of knowledge, special educators are often solely responsible for teaching skills that support reading comprehension, such as knowledge-based inference-making. This article provides special educators with information and resources to enhance their understanding of knowledge-based inferencing and methods for teaching knowledge-based inference-making to middle grade students with disabilities and those who are at risk for reading failure.

Simplified but Not the Same: Tracing Numeracy Events through Manually Simplified Newsela Articles

New York-based education startup Newsela has quickly gained popularity with K-12 educators in the six years since its launch. Its website boasts that it serves 90% of schools in the United States including the 1.5 million teachers they employ and their 20 million students. But what makes it so popular? Teachers are drawn to its Common Core-aligned informational texts which facilitate content-area connections while exposing students to important current events. Likely the most appealing aspect of the platform is its compatibility with differentiation, as it makes available five iterations of each article at varying levels of complexity or Lexile which enables teachers to assign the same article to all students regardless of differences in reading ability. Because all Newsela articles are nonfiction, many utilize mathematical representations to communicate quantitative information, placing demands on students’ numeracy competencies. This paper presents the findings of a thematic analysis of the numeracy events found in five Newsela articles at the maximum complexity level and their four simplified equivalents. It explores the various ways in which quantitative information is represented in Newsela articles at differing levels of complexity and what happens to the mathematical representations of quantitative information as text complexity decreases. The analysis reveals that seven different forms of mathematical representation are commonly used in Newsela articles at both ends of the complexity spectrum, at similar rates. As text complexity decreases, authors rely upon qualitative representations of quantitative information, or mathematical words and phrases, more heavily than quantitative representations, which utilize numbers.

Reading literacy and periphrastic capacity in the context of individual language development

The aim of the study was to develop linguistic and methodological theoretical aspects of training the skill of paraphrasing, which constitutes an important element of reading literacy. To this end, the authors reviewed research and educational publications in the field of teaching the Russian language and conducted a pedagogical experiment to analyse pedagogical processes. Interrelation between the infosphere and axiosphere of Russian language lessons within the pedagogical discourse involves the division of didactic texts into informational and axiological, including modern linguistic and ethnographic texts that manifest Russian cultural concepts in the new information age. It is shown that various aspects of teaching paraphrasing and interpretation techniques on the basis of informational texts have already been elucidated quite efficiently. However, formation of the axiological component of reading literacy (teaching to paraphrase on the basis of linguo-ethnographic texts) has been undertaken within the framework of the present study for the first time. These issues should be considered comprehensively, in the context of language and values-based development of a personality.

The “Bane of the Bassinet”? Graphic Novels as Informational Texts

Originally, the authors were accepted to present this topic at the 2020 ALA Annual Conference as an Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Hot Topic. As the conference was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, information from the presentation was adapted for this article.

Promoting Self-Awareness and Social Awareness in Middle School Students Through Literature Featuring Diverse Characters

High-quality narrative and informational texts can provide young adolescents with mirrors which reflect their lived experiences and windows into the lives of those with whom they are less familiar. These texts can connect with the social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies of self-awareness and social awareness. Connections between SEL programs and integration with literacy practices are described. Literacy approaches grounded in reader response theory and critical literacy theory provide the basis for reading and understanding diverse texts and support the development of SEL competencies. The chapter presents criteria for selecting high-quality literature, 13 text recommendations for self-awareness and social awareness, and ideas for activities and discussion.