The reading skills of children in the Netherlands have been significantly declining since 2015. Reading skills are fundamental for successful participation in society. The reading enjoyment of...Show moreThe reading skills of children in the Netherlands have been significantly declining since 2015. Reading skills are fundamental for successful participation in society. The reading enjoyment of children is also declining and reading enjoyment is associated with reading skills. Research has shown that struggling readers need individualized intensive multicomponent reading interventions to improve their reading skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two online reading interventions on reading skills and reading enjoyment of struggling readers in grades 4 and 5. The first reading intervention, the ‘Universele Interventie voor Lezen’ (UIL), is individualized and intensive and uses direct and explicit instruction. The second reading intervention, the ‘Meelees Interventie’ (MLI), is individualized, but less intensive and makes less use of direct and explicit instruction. Both interventions cover multiple components of reading. The interventions were compared to a wait-list control group (CG) in which children received the UIL at the end of the study. Reading skills were divided in word reading, reading fluency and reading comprehension and were measured using CBM word reading, CBM reading aloud, and CBM maze-selection. Reading enjoyment was measured using the Reading and Me Survey. Results revealed that struggling readers in the intervention conditions (UIL and MLI) made significantly greater pre-posttest gains in word reading than did struggling readers in the control group. No significant effects were found for reading fluency, reading comprehension or reading enjoyment. The results suggest that providing extra, intensive individualized multicomponent reading interventions to struggling 4th- and 5th-grade readers over a period of 4 weeks with 8 sessions may increase their word reading skills, but not their reading fluency skills, their reading comprehension skills or their reading enjoyment. In addition, the results suggest that interventions with more and less direct and explicit instruction were equally effective.Show less
Declining reading skills among Dutch schoolchildren have been visible for a number of years, and the gap between strong and weak readers continues to increase. To identify ways to reduce this gap,...Show moreDeclining reading skills among Dutch schoolchildren have been visible for a number of years, and the gap between strong and weak readers continues to increase. To identify ways to reduce this gap, this study examines what support can be offered to weak readers in addition to regular reading lessons at school. It consists of a between-subject design with two interventions and a control group. The first intervention type (UIL) provided students with explicit reading instructions. The second intervention type (RA) mainly involved reading along with the student, similar to what parents do who read along with children at school. The interventions were given online through Microsoft Teams or Zoom. The effect of the interventions on improving students’ reading skills was examined for three dependent variables: word reading, silent reading and reading aloud. A significant effect was found only for word reading, with students in both the UIL and RA condition performing, on average, significantly better than students in the control condition and with students in the UIL condition performing, on average, significantly better than students in the RA condition. The study concludes that both intervention types did not have the desired effect on improving students’ reading skills as a whole, only on word reading. Further research should examine whether the online format or duration of the study could explain these results.Show less
A theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can...Show moreA theoretical debate between three thinkers on the future of literature in the age of new media shows there is dissent regarding whether literature’s narrative and new media’s database forms can productively coexist or that the latter will supplant the former. To make sense of these different views, this thesis will consider the question of how reading skills change on the basis of interrelations between literature and new media. The case-study, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, seems to have a proto-database form while being essentially narrative. It may, therefore, be considered a hybrid between old and new media as well as a reflection of media-literature evolution itself. The novel builds a signification structure into the text that directs the reading direction nonlinearly, allowing for a plurality of voices and ways of looking at the world. Interpreted nonlinearly, Infinite Jest offers an allegory not for reading but precisely for the impossibility thereof. It self-consciously reflects on postmodernism and, specifically, its central thematic of illegibility: it is a novel self-aware of its own impossibility. Infinite Jest diagnoses the illegibility of texts in the age of postmodernism, where one can no longer rely on clear-cut strategies for reading but must employ a creativity in learning how to read as a production rather than a discovery of meaning. Novels like Infinite Jest, it appears, serve as mental practice for new media reading, which requires the reader to switch between reading strategies, or what I coin the modulation proposal, to deal with the phenomenon of ‘information overload.’ Infinite Jest shows that hybridization of narrative and database, or of literature and new media, is a viable – and, hopefully, long-term – possibility for the literature of the future. Literature is right now in the process of adapting itself by borrowing elements from new, digital media, and, re-inventing itself as a form of art that transcends the medium of the book, i.e., literature becomes transmedial. To stay relevant in the age of digital media, literature needs to reinvent itself time and again.Show less