21st Century Reading was created through a partnership between TED, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading ideas through short, powerful talks and National Geographic Learning. 21st Century Reading provides the ideal forum for learners of English to make connections with topics ranging from science to business to global issues. Using TED Talks as the springboard to share ideas, this new four-level reading series shows learners how to understand and respond to ideas and content in English.

This book presents cutting-edge research findings in areas critical to advancing reading research in the 21st century context, including new literacies, reading motivation, strategy instruction, and reading intervention studies. While students’ reading performance is currently receiving unprecedented attention, there is a lack of research that adopts an international perspective and draws on research expertise from different parts of the world to present a concerted effort, discussing key research models and findings on how to improve reading education. Addressing this gap in the literature, the book also responds to the challenge of promoting higher levels of literacy, and supporting and developing readers who can enjoy and critique texts of every genre.

Teaching and learning in the 21st century have new implications for English language education since the core focus of learning in the 21st century involves collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication. Re-orientation of current curriculum, syllabus and content in English language education may be required and this could be attained by creating fundamental understanding of the concepts in relation to the main skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking), as well as other elements such as professional development of teachers, assessment and technology integration. This book aims to provide and facilitate such understanding to researchers, teachers, students and parents in deliberating, examining and resolving the main issues that beleaguer and challenge everyone and anyone involved in the teaching and learning in the 21st century. This volume draws together various researches, theoretical understandings, ideas and practices that reflect the above.

Reference service, the idea that librarians provide direct assistance to users, has been a central function of libraries for over a century. Today's libraries are even more complex and intimidating to new users than libraries of the past, and the technical and social contexts in which users experience their library's resources add to this complexity. The availability of a friendly librarian who helps users find materials, search for information on a topic, interpret citations, identify quality information, and format bibliographies has become a standard component of what libraries do. However, changes in technologies, economics, and user populations are causing many libraries to question the need and function of traditional reference services. This book examines how library services meet user needs in the twenty-first century. Many libraries are asking key questions about reference services, such as: Should librarians be on call waiting for users or out in the community promoting the library? Should we assign staff to help users one-on-one or is it more effective to assign them to build and use tools to teach users how to find and evaluate information? Will we continue to purchase commercial reference sources or just use Wikipedia and other free resources on the web? With the proliferation of information available today, how can we help users evaluate search results and select the best resources that they can find? And how do we evaluate the effectiveness of reference services? Through contributions from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, this volume addresses such issues and how they affect practices in public and academic libraries. In addition, it presents perspectives from the publishing community and the creators of discovery tools. Each section is enhanced by short case studies that highlight real-world practices and experiences.

Use a fresh 21st century skills approach to address the common difficulties associated with teaching adolescents to read content-area material. The strategies presented in this book will allow teachers to differentiate instruction to best meet students' literacy needs. This resource is aligned to the interdisciplinary themes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

Social, cultural and technological developments are revolutionizing library services. The way ahead for the profession is now generally seen as a practical blend of traditional and electronic materials with integrated support services which fit seamlessly into users' normal ways of working. This is leading to a fundamental rethinking of the role of the library in society. Drawing on the author's recent research, this timely second edition of The Library in the Twenty-first Century offers a clear new model of how traditional and electronic sources can co-exist in the library of the future, building on the previous work by focusing on the library as a vehicle for encouraging creativity as well as a provider of information resources. It is now commonplace that libraries have a major role to play as expert intermediaries, helping users to gain access to the tools needed for effective acquisition and use of information, within the broader context of the networked information world. But it is beginning to be recognized that they still have a profounder role within their communities, and this book emphasizes that beyond the intermediary role is the vital requirement to promote understanding and engagement. Written by one of our most experienced librarians and drawing on a range of international research and development experience, this authoritative work offers the following topics: libraries in the modern world the view from the sectors cross-sectoral models the profession's view digital libraries what is a good library? linking users to resources beyond the intermediary the library user the information universe. Readership: This incisive text, supported by an extensive glossary and bibliography, proposes a practical agenda of issues for the information profession to tackle, and is essential reading for both established library practitioners and LIS students, as well as for library managers and administrators across all sectors.

In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, including Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by contemporary writers to address the cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st-century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st-Century British Gothic can tests geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability and speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism.