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The purpose of this article is to discuss the stereotype of the librarian and to point to the fact that changing the public view of the librarian requires more than just talking about it. Librarians themselves need to take action. A way to change the image of the librarian could be a new form for reading groups: digital reading groups initiated by libraries.

This article presents a Danish project concerning digital reading groups and the experiences made so far by the involved groups e.g. librarians and readers. The article introduces a historical view on the stereotyped librarian and uses a case study to illustrate the situation today.

The historical conditions that constitute the Danish librarian stereotype show a discrepancy between the role and function of the modern librarian and the way the librarian is seen in a wider public. The applied case study, concerning digital reading groups, shows that digital reading groups work both as a way for the librarian to communicate with the reader in a more dialogical fashion, as a way for the public library to test new promotion tools which point in direction of Web 2.0 and as a more flexible promotion offer to the busy reader. Consequently, the digital reading groups offer a model that can bridge the gap between the librarian stereotype, the librarian and the library user.

This article is based on experiences made in connection with a Danish literature promotion project where digital reading groups are launched for the first time. It shows how public libraries can use literature promotion on the internet, not only to reach new users, but also to change the librarian stereotype and upgrade the librarians in direction of Librarian 2.0.

In this chapter, we describe the policy and practical decisions one school district and school had to make to implement a progress monitoring and Response to Intervention (RtI) model in an historically low-achieving school with a substantial population of students at risk tfor academic failure – characteristics that are common to many public schools across the nation. We contrast the lofty goals and theoretical orientations of RtI described in a burgeoning literature in special and general education with the “real life” burdens of capacity, resources, time, and school culture in a struggling school.

Research readings groups represent a recent innovation in accounting doctoral education that appears to be spreading at research-oriented universities. In this chapter, the authors describe how accounting research readings groups can serve as a mechanism to engage doctoral students in the consumption and discussion of research throughout all phases of the doctoral program. An accounting research readings group supplements the breadth of knowledge gained in doctoral seminars by adding depth of knowledge in a focal research area. The authors offer insights from the educational psychology literature to justify research readings groups as a form of team-based learning and then offer suggestions on the formation and operation of these groups. The authors enumerate the many benefits that these groups afford to both doctoral students and faculty members. The authors also distribute a survey to faculty organizers of the existing accounting research readings groups and share the results of this survey to supplement their advice with firsthand experiences, the authors also share the results of a survey distributed to faculty organizers of existing accounting research readings groups. The authors’ goal is to encourage the use of accounting research readings groups to inspire, foster, and enhance the research culture within accounting departments and doctoral programs.

This paper aims to observe, measure and record comparative cognitive processes in print and online to explain the differences, if any, in the readers’ information-gathering processes and their subsequent comprehension and retention of information. It also examined the strategies that readers adopt that differ from print when reading online. Standardized reading comprehension scores were also collected. The results indicated that the participants demonstrated functional equivalency in both media, but they had a preference for print. The linear individualistic mentality learned through print gave the study group participants the skills to successfully navigate through the dense web of information that constitutes the Internet. Story presentation and hierarchy, key elements of the print design process, are less evident or absent online. As a consequence, as previous research has demonstrated, online readers are more poorly informed than print readers – but not in this case. The research from this study demonstrates that when the authors of the print media are those who also control the integrity of online content, print and Web readers are equally well-informed.

Coded texts from The Guardian Newspaper, The Economist and The New Yorker were used in a media lab to measure the study group’s ability to read and retrieve information from the publications’ print and Web editions. They were scored on how well they retrieved the core information in the articles from both media. Focus-group sessions probed for information about reading in print and online at the end of the reading sessions. This gave valuable insight into the coping strategies that the participants used when engaging with online texts. There were two sessions, each of three hours, and the participants were university students.

The study results show that the group participants were functionally equivalent in both print and online reading. However, they had a profound distrust for online content in general, which they found to be inaccurate and unstable. Web sites, they conclude, never achieve “fixity”. When reading online, the study group scrolls through the text to retrieve facts and then goes to a print source to verify the accuracy of the content. They do not engage with the content online as they do with print. While acknowledging that the publications in the study were reputable and of a high quality, the group still found scrolling through the Web sites tedious. The printed page was to the study group, a cultural object.

This was a small study with 11 participants in a controlled environment on two evenings, each lasting three hours. While the readings were intense, the researchers saw no evidence of fatigue. The group were very vocal during the focus-group sessions and gave valuable insights into the reading process. The stories were exactly the same in both media, were well-written and edited. Typographic cues that give the reader priorities when engaging with the texts were transferred from the print to the online editions. HTML texts to this group are an impediment to the reading process, and the amount of texts require too much time to read. A larger study with a more diverse readership reading more general news is required to verify the findings. This is being planned. As one from the study group stated “I grew up with print but younger people do not have the benefits of print”.

Typography provides a language with visual form and through that form, conveys the meaning of a text. The print reader decodes what she reads on the printed page, allowing her to quickly absorb and parse large amount of text, discarding redundant content. The question now becomes which print-reading operations are being transferred to the process of extracting relevant facts. Five centuries of continuous improvement of print communications have yet to be successfully transferred to the Internet. The visual aspects of print, the color advertisement, the photograph and elements that aided the print reader’s navigation are an intrusion on the Web. A new form of navigation, one that is more elegant and intuitive than the present, is required.

The social implications of reading are a fundamental characteristic of any society. The codex provided the model for the book, the newspaper and the magazine. These became and still are trusted sources of information. When the study group gets a Twitter or Facebook prompt on a breaking news story, they check a trusted broadcasting source for confirmation of its accuracy. If the findings of this study are confirmed in subsequent research studies on the process of reading online, it will have profound implications for the industry. Publishing to be successful requires the reader to engage with and respond to a message. There is strong evidence that this is not the case with what the advertising industry would consider an important core audience, the Internet “reader”.

As a newspaper and magazine designer and teacher, the author been increasingly concerned with the transfer of information from the printed page to the computer screen. Many studies have been conducted on aspects of reading and designing for online reading. They are very often inaccurate and as such inconclusive. Reading is complex and measuring it difficult. The author conducted this study as both a designer and from an academic perspective. It is hoped that it encourages a robust debate.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of e-books on attitude towards reading among elementary school students. The paper also reflects on issues related to readings and e-books.

Experimental method of research was used to carry out the study. Experiment was conducted on fourth-grade students in an international school in Kuwait. The control group consisted of nine students. The experimental group had 16 students: eight read the book under the “read-to-me” feature and the other half read the book alone. Students in the two groups were assigned readings randomly and their reactions were studied and compared using different methods.

The experiment demonstrated that students enjoyed reading the electronic medium more than the paperback alternative. The difference, however, was not significant. In addition, difference between the comprehension levels of the three conditions was also insignificant. Students did, however, finish reading the paperback book in a significantly shorter time.

A pilot study would have been desirable and also the number of questions asked in the comprehension test could have been expanded. The authors were also not able to explore the possibility of using an automated tool to record the reading time. The two reading instruments used (iPads and iPods) might have affected the students’ understanding and enjoyment of the book, although no noticeable differences were found.

The experiment indicted that one of the apparent benefits of reading the e-book was its built-in picture dictionary, as the book used in the study incorporated a lot of word coinage in his texts. Lessons learnt from the study can benefit in enhancing features of e-books and designing reading programmes to help build more positive attitude towards reading among children.

Little research has been reported in the literature on investigation of e-books towards reading attitude particularly using empirical studies or experimental research. Most literature focuses on availability of e-books and their features. This study makes a good contribution to the literature on this important aspect of research and makes available useful practical information as well.

The present study focused on examining the effects of a multimedia-based Internet extensive reading program on promoting the receptive skills of Iranian university students.

In the quantitative section of this explanatory sequential mixed-method study, a pretest-posttest design was used to compare the performance of three groups of Iranian university students in terms of their degrees of improvement in receptive proficiency. Besides, the differences in the levels of motivation among the learners were sought. The three classes under study included linear text extensive reading for the first experimental group, a multimedia-based Internet extensive reading group for the other and a control group. The qualitative phase of this study included a semi-structured interview and an open-ended questionnaire.

Analysis of the results revealed that the multimedia-based Internet extensive reading group outperformed the two other groups in terms of proficiency in receptive skills. They also had a higher level of motivation for reading. The findings of the qualitative phase showed that the participants preferred working with multimedia material rather than working with linear texts, or, in other words, printed books. University EFL instructors may be the most beneficiaries of the present study, as they can gain insights into applying Internet-based extensive reading programs into their courses.

Although some studies have been carried out in this area, the paper provides its readers with a new procedure and methodology.

Developing attention-aware systems and interfaces based on eye tracking technology could revolutionize mainstream human–computer interaction to make the interaction between human beings and computers more intuitive, effective and immersive than can be achieved traditionally using a computer mouse. This paper aims to propose an eye-controlled interactive reading system (ECIRS) that uses human eyes instead of the traditional mouse to control digital text to support screen-based digital reading.

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of an experimental group and a control group of learners who, respectively, used the ECIRS and a mouse-controlled interactive reading system (MCIRS) to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension, cognitive load, technology acceptance, and reading behavioural characteristics. Additionally, the effects of learners with field-independent (FI) and field-dependence (FD) cognitive styles who, respectively, used the ECIRS and MCIRS to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension are also examined.

Analytical results reveal that the reading comprehension of learners in the experimental group significantly exceeded those in the control group for the Q&A article, but the difference was insignificant for the pure text article. Moreover, the ECIRS improved the reading comprehension of field-independent learners more than it did that of field-dependent learners. Moreover, neither the cognitive loads of the two groups nor their acceptance of the technology differed significantly, whereas the reading time of the experimental group significantly exceeded that of the control group. Interestingly, for all articles, the control group of learners read mostly from top to bottom without repetition, whereas most of the learners in the experimental group read most paragraphs more than once. Clearly, the proposed ECIRS supports deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS.

This study proposes an emerging ECIRS that can automatically provide supplementary information to a reader and control a reading text based on a reader’s eye movement to replace the widely used mouse-controlled reading system on a computer screen to effectively support digital reading for English language learning. The implications of this study are that the highly interactive reading patterns of digital text with ECIRS support increase motivation and willingness to learn while giving learners a more intuitive and natural reading experience as well as reading an article online with ECIRS support guides learners’ attention in deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS because of simultaneously integrating perceptual and cognitive processes of selection, awareness and control based on human eye movement.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an experiment in introducing fiction e‐books in two reading groups run by a public library.

A user study involving two reading groups run over a period of three months. Electronic versions of titles of interest to each group were given out to each participant on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Readers were then asked to fill in a satisfaction questionnaire and discuss their experience with the rest of their group.

Readers were not too negative about using a new tool/gadget like the PDA but they did not see any advantage in reading an electronic version of the selected book.

It was realised quite earlier on that the target readers were emotionally so attached to physical books to feel as if they were betraying them when reading them electronically. A different sample of users more inclined to use technology and more open to different publishing models would have possibly provided a better insight.

The group reading approach introduced a social side to the adoption of e‐books and it was hoped that that would have made a difference. It was also one of the first attempts to look into the use of fiction e‐books in public libraries as opposed to an already existing number of studies looking into e‐books and their use in education and academic libraries. As such it can benefit both publishers and librarians.

While many works have reported adopting exploratory practice (EP) principles in language teaching research, only a few studies have explored the enactment of EP in an online extensive reading of students majoring in English education. Given the relative paucity of attention to the use of EP as the practitioner research in English language teaching (ELT), the present EP investigates how students understand online extensive reading practice mediated by online group discussion and extensive reading logs, where the first author served as the online extensive reading practice instructor.

The exploratory practice focuses on incorporating research into pedagogy and fastens the importance of the quality-of-life in the classroom. The data were collected through students reading logs and semi-structured interviews. The collected data were analyzed using the thematic analysis. In this case, there were six phases including familiarizing with the data, generating initial codes, searching for the themes, reviewing the themes, defining the theme and writing up.

The findings reveal that online group work driven by EP enables everybody to engage in learning activities. EP assists the students in perceiving their potential and gaining a better awareness of the need to devote themselves to the class. In the EP activities, they work together to build a peaceful situation to advance the quality of learning in EFL classrooms.

The present study’s limitation is the small sample. Apart from that, the research results cannot be generalized to other places.

This study suggests that EP is suitable to create a mutual understanding among the learners and teachers. To conclude, English language competency can be achieved in a pleasant atmosphere through EP.

The present study succeeded in adding new literature studies related to EPs by discussing online group discussions and their challenges during the learning process. These aspects were identified through reading logs and interviews with students. Thus, it focuses on the implementation and challenges of online group discussions.