The Repeated Reading Project: Estonian children's books

In my last post in this series, I mentioned that I was going to start a project in which I keep a learning diary to eventually use as the basis for a diary study.

The project itself is deceptively simple:  I'm going to read Estonian children's books (as in, books that are written in Estonian for children).  I'm going to read them rather slowly.

I've always struggled with reading in Estonian - much more than German.  With German children's books I have a fighting chance of nutting it out as I go along and getting some sort of flow happening, but not so much with Estonian.

English and German belong to the same language family, so they play according to similar rules.  Estonian is a completely different kettle of fish.  As a result, whenever I start trying to read in Estonian (particularly authentic texts) my brain gets really tired really quickly.  There's no flow.  So I tend to give up sooner... which means I don't read as much... which means I don't build up good reading muscles... which means it's hard for me to read in Estonian and my brain gets tired really quickly...

Its a vicious circle.

Plus, in spite of the fact that I've been learning Estonian for some time now, children's books never seem to get any easier.  My fluency in reading passages in textbooks is improving, but whenever I go to authentic texts I hit the same problem: too many unfamiliar words and too many unfamiliar forms of familiar words.

I can't select texts based on the Five Finger Rule, partly because I'm not in a position to look at books before I order them, and partly because I've yet to encounter a sentence in the wild where I'm 100% sure of every word, so I run out of fingers quite quickly.

So, what I'm going to do is a sort of Repeated Reading/Intensive Reading activity.  I'm only going to read short sections (say, one page) of a children's book, leaning heavily on my dictionaries to translate as I go (I know people say you shouldn't do that, but I haven't got much choice), and picking apart a couple of selected sentence with the aid of some grammar books.

BUT, and here's the bit that will hopefully make it interesting, I'll reread every section I've already read before starting a new section.

So by the time I finish the book, I'll have read some pages multiple times.  Especially the first page.  I'll have read that one a lot.

In my learning diary, I'll talk about what I noticed, what stood out for me and what seems to be getting easier.  I'll also pick a few sentences that tickled my fancy and dissect them.

Here's what I think that will achieve (my hypotheses, if you will):

1. I'll start to become so familiar with the words on the first pages that I'll pick up a bit of automaticity concerning them.  As I continue to encounter those words later in the text, I'll (hopefully) start to just know what they are, and gain a bit of flow.  When I encounter those words in other books, I'll won't need to consult the dictionaries so often to remind me what they are.

2. I'll also start recognising particular grammatical constructions and noticing morphological patterns, which will make those same constructions/patterns easier to identify and interpret as the project continues.

3. By the time I reach the end of the book, I'll be consulting the dictionaries and grammar reference books less often, and reading with more fluency.  This will (I hope) improve with each subsequent book I read.

4. As a sideline, I think this will also improve my ability to write in Estonian, as my understanding of the written language will improve.  I'm not sure how to pre-test and post-test, especially since I've already started reading and I didn't think to try to write a passage before hand.  I might do that over the weekend anyway.  At the very least, I'll be able to talk about how I "feel" about my writing ability.

I'm starting with Kust tuli pilv? by Epp Petrone because, of all the Estonian books I own, this has been the easiest one for me to try reading in the past.  I have attempted to read it previously, so it's not completely new to me, but I never *read* it in an "I know what those words actually mean" kind of way.  More of a "I've scanned it, recognised a few words and used the pictures to fill in the blanks in a hap-hazard fashion" kind of way.

My study is somewhat limited by the fact that my library is somewhat limited.  I can only use the books I have access to, and I live in regional Australia.  I'm going to order a few more books by the same author so I can at least do the "proper" Narrow Reading thing to an extent.

My ultimate goal is to magically keep this up as I progress through the books in my collection and get to longer works like Kunksmoor by Aino Pervik and Nukitsamees by Oskar Luts.  With the longer works, I'll have to think strategically about how I'm going to divide the books into sections and how many sections I'll reread before starting a new section, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

It may take some time.

The Repeated Reading Project: Introducing the Diary Study

Remember last year when I used this blog as praxis for studying German grammar ahead of a test?  Well, if you hated that you're not going to enjoy the posts in this series.

I've decided to kick up my Estonian a notch, and I'm going to see if I can spur myself into action by attempting a diary study.

What's a diary study?  It's a type of research in which the researcher is also the researched - they use themselves as the guinea pig, and keep a diary of their progress.  The diary is then analysed and the findings are written up as a paper of some description.

It's kind of like a case study performed on oneself.

I think there's an element to which it is a bit dodgy.  Nothing scientific where the observed and the observer are the same person is ever really that great.  For one thing, the observer's paradox is compounded in multiple ways.  The subject's behaviour alters because she/he is being observed, what the observer notices is altered because she/he is expecting to notice certain things...

And this feeds back into the noticing hypothesis, in which one learns what one notices - so the fact that the researcher is intentionally looking for certain things means she/he is specifically noticing those things, and is then therefore more likely to learn those things.  Under different circumstances, the subject(s) might not notice (and therefor learn) those things at all (or might notice and learn different things).

Plus, any findings are statistically insignificant.

I wouldn't base any decisions on a diary study, unless that decision was "hey, let's try turning this into a bigger study with more people who are observed by other people", but they do give some interesting data, which can be combined with data from other case studies and larger-scale studies to give some actual basis for real decision making.

Maybe the results of this diary study will be useful for research in the language acquisition and reading in a foreign language fields.

Primarily, I've decided to do this specifically because it will give me a reason to a) remember to keep the project going, and b) prompt me to keep a learning diary.

Remember what I said above about the noticing hypothesis?  It really works - the more attention you pay to something, the more likely you are to actually internalise it and remember it later.  Keeping a learning diary is brilliant for that.  Unfortunately, unless there's a due date attached to something, I usually forget to do it - even if it is incredibly useful.

So, I'm going to keep a learning diary (posted on this blog), which will become the primary source of data for my diary study.

What's the actual project, you say?

I'm glad you asked.  See the next post.

What you know to be useful, or what you believe to be beautiful

I'm reading a book about decluttering at the moment: It's All Too Much: Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, by Peter Walsh.  I'm only a few chapters in, and I'm finding it a bit repetitive, to be honest.  Much like an American TV show, it seems to be written on the basis that you can't quite remember what was said ten minutes ago, so repeating it can't hurt none...  But the advice isn't bad.

Yes, once again I'm looking at my surrounds and thinking "why do I have all this stuff?"

Regular readers may remember my previous daydreams about moving to a yurt and only owning whatever I need that could fit comfortably within that circular, tent-like abode.  Of course, I'm still completely surrounded by things and am no-where near ready for a yurt-ish existence.

Walsh frequently quotes William Morris's edict that you should "have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful," which I think is a lovely way to think about decluttering.

For one thing, it gives me a good justification to keep my favourite toys - I believe them to be beautiful.  On the other hand, it also gives me a good set of criteria to use to weigh up the merits of everything else in my house:

• Is this useful (Y/N)?
• Is this beautiful (Y/N)?
• Is this awesome (Y/N)?

Okay, the last option wasn't part of the original equation, but let's be honest - anything that makes you think "this is totally awesome!" gets a place in your life even if it's hideous and pointless.

I've been thinking a little about weeding lately - in a library context.  I'm on a newly formed "space force", which is keeping track of the use of the space in the building and thinking deep thoughts about what needs to be moved around.

One of the things we're doing is looking at specific, discrete collections and thinking about how the space in those areas are being used (like the Reference Collection, the Curriculum Collection and the Scores Collection).

I know Walsh's book is supposed to be used to help you declutter your house, but I'm starting to wonder what would happen if we applied it to our library.

Walsh advises people to start the decluttering process by completely ignoring the clutter, and instead thinking about a core question:  "What is your ideal life?"

Then, you need to think about each room in terms of: "In my ideal life, what would this room be for?  What would it do for me?" and then regard everything that is in the room with that ideal living space in mind.

That sounds like an interesting way to approach a special collection that has been kicking around long enough to get decidedly unwieldy:

"In my ideal library, what is this collection for?  What would it do for my users/patrons?  What belongs in that ideal space?  What would it look like?"

Then, with the ideal as the goal, reconsider everything in that space (including the shelving) with those core criteria:

Is it useful/beautiful/awesome?

Do we have the guts to do it?

Free Voluntary Reading: How not to do it

When I was in Germany a couple of years ago, I bought a German translation of Agatha Christie's A Death in the Library (Die Tote in der Bibliothek).

I did this as part of a personal experiment in Free Voluntary Reading (FVR - sometimes also known as Voluntary Free Reading, or VFR, but only by people who aren't into brand names).

The core idea behind FVR is that you are more likely to persevere with reading in a foreign language if you are reading something you actually enjoy, and which is interesting enough to keep you going (because you want to know what happens next or see how it ends).

Textbook reading activities are boring.  Trashy teenage romance novels, on the other hand, are fun and engaging.  So get your language learners to abandon their carefully selected passages from Goethe and go straight for the trashy fun stuff.

Agatha Christie novels are fun.  Murder mysteries are designed to keep you guessing.  It seemed perfect.

I wilfully ignored another element of the FVR ethos, however, which was to choose books that aren't too difficult.  If you want to improve reading fluency, you pick books that are within your current reading level.  If you want to improve your vocabulary, you pick books that are mostly within your current reading level - keep it close to what you can comfortably do, with a bit of stretch.

Now, I had successfully ignored this element in the past, when I found a copy of Ursula Wölfel's Julius, oder die wahre Geschichte vom Ziegenbock, der die Leute solange ärgerte, bis alle ihn haben wollten - a hilarious children's book about a couple of sparring communities who had to share an adopted goat.

Sure, I only understood half of what I was reading - but I got the gist, I enjoyed the book, and I understood enough to make it fun rather than confounding.

However, I didn't count on a crime novel written for adults being more textually dense than a comedic children's book.  I didn't get past the first couple of paragraphs, and left it on a shelf for my German abilities to catch up (something that doesn't currently look likely).

Then, last year, I found a copy of the book (in English) in audio format in my library.  I'm quite fond of crime audiobooks, and I thought I might be more capable of making my way through the German version if I was already familiar with the plot and characters.

Then, I had a flash of inspiration - I stopped the CD at the end of the second last chapter.  I took it out of my CD player, and returned it to the library.  I had listened to the entire book, except the last chapter - to find out how the book had ended, I would read the German version.

Brilliant, isn't it?

I had just enough motivation to start reading the first couple of chapters of the book - and just enough knowledge to begin making a decent fist of it...

And then, for one reason or another, I didn't have time to keep going.  And then my German classes didn't work out quite as I had planned, and my German actually regressed rather than improved...

And now it's a year later.

Over a year later.

It turns out that I'm actually not in the least bit frustrated by never finding out whodunnit.  Oh, I'm sure I'll get around to discovering the end of that story eventually, but I don't feel a great need to complete that narrative in order to feel at peace in my life.

Meanwhile, the book is still sitting on my shelf.  Seemingly further away from me than ever.

Get off the floor

I've recently had an operation, and my mobility has been less than stellar.  I'm getting better everyday, but I still have difficulty doing anything at floor level.

I can finally reach down to the floor to pick something up (previously, once it hit the floor it was lost to me), but I can't really spend any quality time down there.

This has made me realise how important it is for libraries to get their collections off the floor.

In the last few days I have found myself in two different libraries where the book I wanted was on the bottom shelf, and the bottom shelf was barely inches higher than the floor.

As I had great difficulty bending down long enough to read the titles of the books to find what I wanted, I found this experience to be particularly unpleasant.

It was also disheartening, as the minute I saw the section I wanted was on the bottom shelf I knew it would be difficult for me.  Both times I seriously considered giving up on the books I wanted rather than putting myself through that kind of discomfort.

In both cases, the effort I had to expend to try to search the shelves at floor height was too much.  I ended up leaving earlier than I had originally intended, simply because the collection itself had worn me out.

Now, when I mentioned this to one of my colleges, her first question was "why didn't you just ask one of the librarians to get it for you?"

The answer is simple and twofold:  a) I'm stubborn, and b) I don't feel like asking for help every single time I can't reach something that looks like it should be within reach.

Asking for help for such simple little things is also unpleasant.

Now, I'm currently having issues with floor-height shelving because I'm recovering from an operation, but when you think about it there are a lot of people with long-term mobility issues (anything from a dodgy back or knee to being in a wheelchair) who would naturally have trouble bending down for long periods of time to look for things.

So, I'd really like to take this opportunity to encourage any library who still has their bottom shelves at floor height to get the collection off the floor.

It's not as trivial as you think, if it is causing your clients pain, discomfort and dismay.

Predictive text

I have a new toy for work. It's a tablet, which comes with a word processing application.  I'm writing this post on the device while attending a meeting.

So far, I have been able to write several sentences using the thing without having to type more than three or four letters for any given word. It amazes me how often I am able to make do without needing to write anything at all.  The predictive text isn't just predicting the word I've started to write, but also the word I'm likely to want next.

I don't know by what magic the device is doing this, but I suspect it has something to do with corpus linguistics.

Corpus linguistics  is a strange and slightly disturbing branch of linguistics that involves dumping entire texts into a database in order to find and analyze patterns.

One of the most interesting things to come out of corpus linguistics is the increased understanding of collocation (and, yes, the device has also been predicting the words corpus, linguistics and collocation).

Collocation looks at words that turn up next to each other (like "next to" and "each other"). We generate a lot of patterns when we speak and write, and certain words tend to follow each other over and over again (like "over and over again").

I think the predictive text used by this device has quite a lot of collocation built in.

When I type "next", the device instantly offers me "to", and when I  type "each", I  get "other" - I don't even have to type the first letter for these words, they are just automatically generated by the device.

I am making quite a lot of sentences by simply touching the next word offered to me.

In fact the next sentence is going to be written using nothing except the options given to me by the program:

I have been in contact with the new version of the world, but I think I can say that I have been able to get some good ideas about what we want to know.

I didn't type a single word for that.  Sure, it didn't exactly make sense, but that's beside the point.

Collocation.  It just might change the way I write in the future.

More on that later. 

Raise your girls to be strong. Teach your women to swim.

I was checking someone's references today when one of the articles he cited caught my attention and I had to read it for myself.

The article, by Joni Seager,¹ notes the fact that most natural disasters have a racial and gender imbalance in terms of the survivors.  In countries like America, black people are likely to be hit hardest by natural disasters.  All over the world, however, women are less likely to survive.

In some cases, the death rates for women have been as high as five times those of men.

People studying this phenomenon have noted that our prevailing stereotypes encourage women and girls to be weak and inactive.  As a result, they aren't strong enough to hold onto the trees.  They are less likely to know how to swim.

Additionally, they're likely to stick around to find and rescue the children, but they aren't strong enough to actually hold on to everyone who needs saving.

By continuing to foster an idea of femininity that doesn't include being physically strong and active, we are literally putting our women and girls in danger.

Let's try making the assumption that "strong enough to survive" is a trait both sexes should share.

1. Seager J. Noticing gender (or not) in disasters. Geoforum. 2006;37(1):2-3. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.10.004