Using online resources in our reading practice

Using Online Resources in our Reading Practice

Yulia Khokhlova

Northern (Arctic) Federal University

Last academic year our third-year students joined the project on Contemporary British fiction in Russian Universities, they read and discussed Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Our approach to the discussion of the novel was rather traditional. We began with a short introduction to the author’s life and career, studied the cover art and the blurb on the cover, and presented a trailer of the stage adaptation of the novel. From the very beginning we faced a challenge of planning and organizing our classes as we did not have any teaching manual or materials at hand. That was why I

decided to incorporate an online resource in our reading experience as I wanted not only to organize our activities but to make our students’ reading process more dynamic and varied and at the same time to explore some educational possibilities of these technologies.

Many foreign language instructors use Padlet which is a free web application. Padlet is a virtual bulletin board or a virtual blackboard where its users can collaborate by posting comments and media. Padlet is a versatile and flexible tool, its advantages are quite evident: it has a simple and clear interface which is user-friendly, and it can be accessible from any device (computers, tablets and mobile phones). Of course it is possible to post some basic assignments and tasks for the classes but my primary aim was to involve our students into some mini projects based on their reading experience. As the language of the novel seems to be rather simple I asked my students to focus not on the vocabulary work but on something different. We noticed that the novel introduced many facts, figures, names, literary allusions, so I asked my students to pay attention to some curious or puzzling details, some obscure quotations and then encouraged them to browse the Internet and find some relevant information about them and share it with the group by posting it on Padlet. Our virtual board gradually evolved into a collage of texts, images, and videos which covered a wide range of topics and provoked online discussions and interpretations which we extended into the classroom. This online activity allowed us to include a variety of topics in our final discussion of Haddon’s novel: the encyclopedic quality of the novel, adolescent psychology, family life and upbringing of children, problems of single parent families, father and son relationship, autism and autistic children, special children and their needs and forms of psychological adaptation and therapy (art-therapy, music therapy, therapeutic powers of animals and pets), problems of inclusive education in Russia.

In the end my students evaluated their experience of working with Padlet. Irina Yurieva pointed out that this form of online activity boosted her motivation to interpret the novel, it could useful for developing critical thinking and creativity. Alexandra Kuznetsova and Ksenia Muzhelovskaya enjoyed the idea of sharing mini projects and continuing discussions in the virtual space. Vlada Pestrikova liked the visual mapping of the novel, whereas Anna Rezanova suggested a more efficient alternative to Padlet - an on-line resource Mindmeister (https ://www. mindmeister. com/ru?r=324656).

It is a well-known fact that the number of hours of classroom instruction at Russian universities has decreased dramatically and we face a problem of organizing and monitoring our students’ individual work. This academic year I am experimenting with an online social reading project. Social reading is a form of collaborative online reading in which several readers read the same text, post comments on it, and respond to other comments. This activity has become quite popular recently. There are many commercial social reading sites on the Internet which provide an opportunity to read books online but there are also free resources, for example SocialBook ml). I have chosen this social reading project as a virtual platform for reading and discussing Ruth Rendell’s Portobello with my students.

Though SocialBook requires some computer literacy (understanding some basic e-book formats and converting tools), it is rather simple to use, you register with the project, upload an e-book (luckily I have one!), create a reading group and invite your students to read online.

I have divided the novel into several parts and give special tasks to each portion of the text every two weeks. These tasks can vary from vocabulary work (for example, highlighting new vocabulary, giving definitions and Russian equivalents to some word combinations and phrases) to stylistic analysis and interpretation practice (for example, pointing out some cases of irony in the text and commenting on them). I also encourage my students to join online discussions of the novel. They can use bookmarking, can annotate the text, can tie comments or questions to a specific bit of the text, can begin and follow conversations in the margins. These online discussions can generate some ingenious ideas. Iliya Pyshkin noted that Portobello is about art, so he searched the Internet for some images of Arnold Boecklin’s works and uploaded them to our on-line reading project thus turning it into a virtual art-gallery.

At present SocialBook is limited to highlighting the text, commenting, uploading images and Internet links, but it is a growing project and is going to develop and add some new features, including the ability to draw in the margins and to upload media (video and audio files).

Padlet and SocialBook are two online resources that provide platforms where students can work, collaborate and share ideas with each other, they incorporate discussion into the reading process and can help study and understand literary texts.

Using Online Resources in our Reading Practice

The article discusses the use of Padlet, a free web application, and SocialBook, a reading and annotation platform, in literary analysis and discussion of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Ruth Rendell’s Portobello.