Prime Time 7/8, Writing, Arbeitsheft

6 26 6 School and education 6.1 Text input Being a better online reader (1)  Soon after Maryanne Wolf published a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite. There were the neurosurgeons who worried about the “cut-and-paste chart mentality” that their students exhibited, missing crucial details because they failed to delve deeply enough into any one case. And there were, of course, the English teachers who lamented that no one wanted to read Henry James anymore. As the letters continued to pour in, Wolf experienced a growing realisation: In the seven years it had taken her to research and write her account, reading had changed profoundly – and the ramifications could be felt far beyond English departments and libraries. What was going on with these students and professionals? Was the digital format to blame for their superficial approaches, or was something else at work? (2)  Certainly, as we turn to online reading, the physiology of the reading process itself shifts; we don’t read the same way online as we do on paper. Anne Mangen, a professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, points out that reading is always an interaction between a person and a technology, be it a computer or an e-reader or even a bound book. The contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of scrolling versus turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the fleetingness of a screen, the ability to hyperlink and move from source to source within seconds online – all these variables translate into a different reading experience. (3) The screen, for one, seems to encourage more skimming behaviour: when we scroll, we tend to read more quickly (and less deeply) than when we move sequentially from page to page. Online, the tendency is intensified as a way of coping with an overload of information. There are so many possible sources, so many pages, so many alternatives to any article or book or document that we read more quickly to compensate. (4) The online world tends to exhaust our resources more quickly than the page. We become tired from the constant need to filter out hyperlinks and possible distractions. And our eyes themselves may grow fatigued from the constantly shifting screens, layouts, colours and contrasts, an effect that holds for e-readers as well as computers. (5) The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analysing and evaluating a text. Much of Mangen’s research focusses on how the format of reading material may affect not just eye movement or reading strategy but broader processing abilities. One of her main hypotheses is that the physical presence of a book – its feel, the weight and order of its pages – may have more than a purely emotional or nostalgic significance. People prefer physical books, not out of old-fashioned attachment but because the nature of the object itself has deeper repercussions for reading and comprehension. Her impression is that the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on an e-reader or computer simply doesn’t have the same tangibility. (6)  Wolf ’s concerns go far beyond simple comprehension. She fears that as we turn to digital formats, we may see a negative effect on the process that she calls deep reading. Deep reading isn’t how we approach looking for news or information, or trying to get the gist of something. It’s the “sophisticated comprehension processes”, as Wolf calls it, that those young architects and doctors were missing. “Reading is a bridge to thought,” she says. “And it’s that process that I think is the really endangered aspect of reading.” (Maria Konnikova, www.newyorker.com , 16 July 2014; adapted) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv