Skip to main content

Reading with other Languages

My mom, my brother and me living in Pisa.
A recent LA Times article (see link and more at bottom of post) writes about how ebook had help increase Spanish-language literature reading. Am I am sure that it did just that. One issue that I always had was finding books for my students to read in their own native language, this was something close to me as I experiences a similar loss in my youth. As an elementary student I started school in Italy, and while I went to school on a military base, we didn't live on base but instead in the local community. Even when I went on base the reading materials were not focused to my reading levels (although there were books available from our school library), but when not in session, we didn't have access to the school library. As such there were not many children's books available. One good thing then was that it did help make be learn to also read in Italian, but on the other hand for English there just wasn't much there. Then once we came back the the States (years later), I had the opposite issue, no books in Italian, in the end I lost my Italian language ability. Today, with the internet and digital readers it is possible to provide books in just about any language that a student needs. So we can use these books to either support their home language or for those learning other languages we can support them with their new languages. I remember that wen I took French in high school (again no Italian option in the town I lived in), there were a few comic based books (Asterix) in French that the teacher had ordered, but not really much other than that for someone to really get into. Today, a teacher could easily access thousands of books in other languages for students to read for fun and development. For an introduction level you might read books from the International Children's Digital Library, which has picture books in over 50 languages, many with translations, at a higher level you might read modern or classic fiction in that language.



Some Possibilities:
Antologia della Letteratura Italiana: http://www.crs4.it/HTML/Literature.htmlItalian: Novels, poetry, plays & other texts, both classic & contemporary, in HTML, for reading online.
Aozora Bunko: http://www.aozora.gr.jp
Over 2000 works of  Japanese literature. Formats include: HTML, ZIP, and Japanese ebook.
Athena Texts Francais: http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/
French: 10,000 eBooks (French & Swiss Authors) Literature, philosophy, history, economics, & science, etc.
Belarusian e-Library: http://knihi.com
Belarusian literature in Belarusian, with some English, German & other translations.
Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France): http://gallica.bnf.fr
French: Over 2500 digitized works.
Biblioteca Virtual do Estudante Brasileiro: http://www.bibvirt.futuro.usp.br/index.html?principal.html&2
Portuguese: Several hundred eBooks
Portuguese: Over sixty free titles from 26 authors, including José de Alencar, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Afonso Henrique da Lima Barreto. All public domain books or with author permission. Formats include Word, PDF, RTF and Palm PDB.
Digital Library of India: http://www.dli.ernet.in/
Indian: Over 29,000 books predominantly in Indian languages.
International Children's Digital Library (ICDL): http://www.icdlbooks.org/ 
The ICDL is building an international collection  that reflects both the diversity and quality of children's literature around the world
books available online here, in both Russian & English in ZIP and HTML formats.
Libros Tauro (Argentina): http://www.librostauro.com.ar/
Spanish: Several thousand eBooks
New Threads Chinese Cultural Society: http://www.xys.org
Chinese: Electronic library archive of Chinese classic texts.
ngiyaw eBooks ( German): http://ngiyaw-ebooks.org/
German works with some classic English and Hungarian books also. Formats include: (.pdf), (.prc), (.lit), (.tr), and (HTML) for your Web browser.
Online Books Page Links to Foreign Language Libraries:http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html#foreign
Links to over seventy foreign language libraries with languages ranging from Afghan to Czech, French to Russian, Latin to Yiddish.
Classic texts in Italian, English and Latin. Available formats:  HTML ; RTF; TXT.
Panjab Digital Library represents an effort to preserve and make accessible the rich heritage of Panjab through digitization. Books magazines, newspapers, and photos related to the Sikhs and the Indian region o Panjab.
Project Gutenberg Europe: http://pge.rastko.net/
Over 17,000 books in 58 languages.
Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy: http://www.rusf.ru


E-readers fuel rise of Spanish-language lit
Spanish-language readers and bookstores in the U.S. have long bemoaned the dearth of titles, but the popularity of e-readers has spurred a flood of affordable works. Amazon's eBooks Kindle en Español store boasts more than 70,000 titles, more than twice as many as it launched with in 2012, while Barnes & Noble sells about 65,000 Spanish-language books for the Nook. Los Angeles Times (tiered subscription model) (1/11)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of  meta
1 comment
Read more

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 8: Textbook structure

Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle
Post a Comment
Read more

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support
7 comments
Read more