Recently in Academic Study Reading Category

Thanks to some small grant support from Santa Clara University and Osu Children's Library Fund, this summer FAVL will run a few more pilot small-scale summer reading programs. Nowhere near the scale of the UK's national Summer Reading Challenge but enough to have some measurable effects at the village level. Osu Children's Library Fund will help fund a small reading camp in one of the libraries. We're thinking of running it for three weeks, five days a week. Participants (aged 10-13) will do a lot of reading (in groups, with partners, alone, aloud, silent) and a lot of playing (crafts, games, puzzles). The Santa Clara University research grant is to run some less intensive summer reading programs (once a week book discussion groups).

Maybe by the end too we'll have a little Youtube video advertising the programs... turns out there are dozens that have been posted to Youtube- librarians with a little too much time on their hands????

The text that accompanies the video is as follows:

A second grade class at Naab Abga School in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, taught by Juliette Guere, was videotaped as part of a World Bank effort at developing teacher training materials on how to improve instructional time use and learning efficiency managed by the Human Development Network and Independent Evaluation Group, task manager Helen Abadzi. The teacher takes time to write brief texts on the blackboard. The students take turns reading this brief text at the board, write it on their slates and finally reorder the words using the slates. The brevity of the text limits reading practice in class and delays the acquisition of automaticity. As a result, the students may remain functionally illiterate for years.

A nice presentation by Matthew Jukes at the Comparative and International Education Society meeting this morning, about a randomized trial in Kenya where older kids who are relatively immune to the fever symptoms of malaria, but nevertheless are infected and full of the parasites, improved school performance significantly with a once-every-three-months anti-malarial pill. Seems that the parasites make you anemic, even if not feverish. Books are important for reading, but not having malaria is pretty darn important too. So what if kids had a book where they read about all the awful effects that malaria was having on them, and showing how to use a mosquito bednet? That would be a good book for FAVL volunteers to start working on.

FAVL is looking for funding to run some reading programs this coming summer, and be able to get a good idea of the effects of various summer reading programs compared with a low-cost alternative of simply giving children some books for summer reading. How much would it matter if the kids participated in a book discussion program, or some out-loud reading, in a community library, versus simply have the books? The programs gets kids to the library, where books are shareable, the book distribution gets books into kids homes, but the books are less shareable.

Turns out there is no evidence that I have been able to find of studies like this in the rural African villages that we at FAVL care about. The closest study I can find is by James Kim, an education specialist now at Harvard. Here's the abstract for one of his papers:

The Effects of a Voluntary Summer Reading Intervention on Reading Achievement: Results from a Randomized Field Trial

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention were assessed in a randomized field trial involving 552 students in 10 schools. In this study, fourth-grade children received 8 books to read during summer vacation, and were encouraged by their teachers to practice oral reading at home with a family member and to use comprehension strategies during independent, silent reading. Reading lessons occurred during the last month of school in June, and 8 books were mailed to students on a biweekly basis during July and August. The estimated treatment effects on a standardized test of reading achievement (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) were largest for students who reported owning fewer books at home, less fluent readers, and minority students. These findings suggest that a voluntary summer reading intervention may represent a scaleable and cost-effective policy for improving reading achievement among lower-performing students.

See also: Literature Review on the Impact of Summer Reading Clubs

Someday a bright anthropologist, sociologist or littéraire will write the Africa-based equivalent of Margaret Clark's Young Fluent Readers. I think it would be so fascinating. The little girl in our promotional video (on the webpage www.favl.org) seems like she probably would be a great candidate for inclusion in the study.

Regionalism and the Reading Class
Wendy Griswold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Pub. Date: January 28, 2008

Publisher blurb: Globalization and the Internet are smothering cultural regionalism, that sense of place that flourished in simpler times. These two villains are also prime suspects in the death of reading. Or so alarming reports about our homogenous and dumbed-down culture would have it, but as Regionalism and the Reading Class shows, neither of these claims stands up under scrutiny—quite the contrary. Wendy Griswold draws on cases from Italy, Norway, and the United States to show that fans of books form their own reading class, with a distinctive demographic profile separate from the general public. This reading class is modest in size but intense in its literary practices. Paradoxically these educated and mobile elites work hard to put down local roots by, among other strategies, exploring regional writing. Ultimately, due to the technological, economic, and political advantages they wield, cosmopolitan readers are able to celebrate, perpetuate, and reinvigorate local culture. Griswold’s study will appeal to students of cultural sociology and the history of the book—and her findings will be welcome news to anyone worried about the future of reading or the eclipse of place.

And then searching on who Griswold is, I come across her other book, which looks terrific:

Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria
Wendy Griswold

Publisher blurb: Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These--together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe's writing--are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa's most populous nation. Drawing on interviews with Nigeria's writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels--from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces--Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern. Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.