Middle & Junior
High Core Collection
Nonbook
Materials
Core Collection
Public Library
Core Collection:
Nonfiction
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Is It a Picture Book or a Wordless Graphic
Novel? We often think of books with little or no text that tell a story through pictures as something for small children, but a graphic novel can also have no text. Maybe there is a child in all of us that loves a story in pictures, ever since the narrative cave paintings, murals, tapestries, and stained-glass windows of the past. The recent explosion in graphic novel publishing has brought up some interesting examples of this new cross-over genre. Here is one we are particularly fond of: The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. Shaun Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and now lives in Melbourne. In 2006, The Arrival won the "Book of the Year" prize as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. It won the Children's Book Council of Australia "Picture Book of the Year" award in 2007, the same year it was published in the United States. On the record below, from Wilson’s Graphic Novels Core Collection, Middle and Junior High Core Collection, and Senior High Core Collection, you can see some of the other awards it has since won. The grade levels assigned to this book by the Core Collections editors are 6 7 8 9 10. Those are the levels for which the book is recommended as a library acquisition, but I can assure you that adults love this book as much as young people. It was passed around the office with great enthusiasm. It tells a story that everyone can relate to: a man who arrives in a strange land, not knowing for sure where he is or how to get by. The pictures look a lot of Ellis Island, although they do no depict any specific place. We will be on the lookout for his next book. The Arrival is “A Most Highly Recommended Title.”
Audiobooks and Literacy I spent a good deal of time recently talking with librarians about collecting nonbook materials, and audiobooks in particular. In public libraries it is an easy decision, because audiobooks are so popular with people who commute and people with poor vision, but for school libraries it is not so easy. There is a resistance among many people, parents and teachers, towards the use of audiobooks in education. The thinking seems to be that reading should be work. If something is too easy, it can’t be good. Audiobooks are cheating. I said, when I was in school (fifty years ago) our teachers read aloud to us. Some of them spent a great deal of time reading aloud to us, and I remember the books they read vividly. No more, I was told. Now you teach only for the tests. If something is not on the standardized tests, you don’t teach it, and reading aloud is not on the tests. Hmm. Isn’t vocabulary and reading comprehension on the tests? What could be a greater aid in vocabulary building and comprehension than listening to a long story that is written at a level somewhere above where you can read on your own? Isn’t that how kids learn words and sentence structure naturally, by hearing them used, rather than by studying grammar or looking up words in a dictionary? I looked around to see what others have said. Here is Dr. Frank Serafini in his book Audiobooks & Literacy, An Educator’s Guide to Utilizing Audiobooks in the Classroom: “Experts agree that reading aloud is the single most important activity for developing proficient reading skills. The road to becoming a reader begins with hearing stories read aloud.” And, “In an overcrowded curriculum, teachers are being asked to do more for each student with less time and fewer resources. This is where audiobooks can play a significant role in developing reading abilities in young readers.” http://www.randomhouse.com/highschool/RHI_magazine/pdf/serafini.pdf Here is Janet Allen, who spends her time researching, writing, and consulting with schools and teachers who are changing their literacy practices: “For many readers, saying they don't like to read has become an acceptable response to allow them to escape many reading activities. Not wanting to appear to be schoolboys or schoolgirls, even students who like to read often won't admit it. Once readers say they don't like to read often enough, it becomes a habit and a belief. I found audio books to be the most significant factor in overcoming that belief system in my own classroom and in the literacy project classrooms I visit around the country. Kyle Gonzalez and I wrote extensively about the logistics of using audio books in There's Room for Me Here. It was amazing for us to see students develop such language fluency from reading books with audiotapes that they were able to wean themselves from the recordings. We watched them use the tapes for support as they chose increasingly more difficult texts, thereby compensating for the difference between their listening and reading vocabularies.” http://www.audiobookshelf.com/success.html Families nowadays seldom sit together in the evenings, as they did many years ago, listening to someone read Dickens or Thackeray, but we can still have the same experience, if somewhat more solitary, listening to a great reader on an audiobook. (Joseph Miller is the Vice President of Cataloging and General Reference at The H. W. Wilson Company)
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