Boys read as much as girls but prefer the simpler books, survey shows

First the good news: boys are reading as much as girls. Now the bad: the books they choose are far less challenging and easier to comprehend than those selected by girls, and this gets worse as they grow older.

The findings of a major study of 100,000 children's reading habits coincide with national curriculum test results which show that – at all ages – girls score more highly on reading tests. “Boys are clearly reading nearly as much as girls, a finding that may surprise some onlookers,” said Professor Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee’s school of education, who headed the study. “But boys are tending to read easier books than girls. The general picture was of girls reading books of a consistently more difficult level than boys in the same year.”

The gap in the standard of their reading habits becomes most marked between the ages of 13 and 16, the report says. The favourite girl’s book in this age group is Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, the first in the vampire romance series that has sold 85 million copies worldwide. This was ranked far more difficult to read than the boys’ favourite, The Dark Never Hides, from the British novelist Peter Lancett's Dark Man series, illustrated fantasy novels aimed at reluctant teens and young adults struggling to read.

The study notes that both sexes tend to choose books that are easier to read once they reach the age of 11 and transfer to secondary school. Compared with a similar study two years ago, the Harry Potter author JK Rowling has tumbled down the top 10 most popular children’s authors, from second to ninth place.

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Breaking down language barriers on the web

The Internet is rapidly expanding around the world, with thousands of non-English web pages being added daily.

The number of non-English websites is expected to grow as the web opens up to more people across the world and domain names expand to include native character sets.

In late 2009, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the creation of internet addresses containing non-Latin characters.

The web provides billions of people with information, across a range of different languages. According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com) in September 2009, the total number of English internet users made up only 27.6 percent of internet users around the world. Chinese language users followed closely behind with 22.1 percent.

Internet users speaking Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Russian and Korean were in the top ten most used languages on the web.

Google introduced a new beta version of their Chrome web browser for Windows users on March 1 hoping to bridge the widening internet language gap and “make the world’s information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way.”

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Scholar analyzes South Asia English

GIESSEN, Germany—English as spoken in South Asia is evolving, but there is no sign it is turning into a separate dialect that English speakers from other continents might not understand, according to Joybrato Mukherjee, a top German linguistics scholar.

The University of Giessen professor uses computer analysis, based on one-million-word samples of Indian and five other South Asian varieties of English, to discover their distinctive words as well as slight regional differences in grammar.

English spread around the globe with the British Empire. Linguists say there is no authoritative standard English. All the spinoffs exist side by side and are “right” for the people who speak them. English in India functions a little differently from English in England. Take the word, “prepone,” the opposite of postpone, which most other English speakers have never heard of.

“In British English you would have to say ‘bring forward in time’,” explained Mukherjee, who is of Indian origin.

“It shows Indian English speakers approach this very analytically. They use the prefix ‘pre’ and combine it with ‘pone.’ Actually, the question should be why there isn't any word 'prepone' in British English. It would be much easier,” he said. “Native languages are much more historically conditioned, whereas it's generally a tendency among post-colonial varieties that speakers handle their second language much more rationally.

“There are, for example, in Indian English lots and lots of words that end in -ee, like rewardee – the one who gets a reward – which is uncommon in British English, but very common in Indian English.”

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Colleges test Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader as study tool

Even before Apple announced the iPad, higher-education technologists predicted that e-book readers were on the brink of becoming a common accessory among college students; last fall, two-thirds of campus CIOs said they believed e-readers would become an "important platform for instructional resources" within five years, according to the Campus Computing Project.

Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets. Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before. But they also noted that the shift had some key environmental benefits. Further, a minority of students embraced the Kindle fairly quickly as highly desirable for curricular use.

If one clear consensus emerged from the studies that have been finalized at Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, it is this: For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience.

"Because it was difficult to take notes on the Kindle, because PDF documents could not be annotated or highlighted at all, and because it was hard to look at more than one document at once, the Kindle was occasionally a tool that was counter-productive to scholarship," Princeton researchers wrote in a summary of their study, released Monday.

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