Tag: Literacy for Understanding

For years now I have greatly enjoyed reading both fiction and non-fiction books, with fiction being my favourite.  I used to be an avid reader sometimes going through several books a month, nowadays however I find that I don’t read as much as I would like to, probably because I don’t have enough time and because I’ve read most of the books in my house, several times.  As I said, fictional books are my preferred choice of reading, with the Harry Potter series being my absolute favourite and The Maze Runner Series coming in second.  Although I prefer fictional books I do quite like to read non-fictional books too, I like how they are based on fact and open your understanding on certain topics that you have some previous knowledge on or have no understanding of at all.  Reading non-fictional books can also widen your search for topic work in a classroom as you could be inspired to choose a topic that you ordinarily wouldn’t have chosen either because you didn’t know enough about it or didn’t know anything at all about it.  Most of the fictional books I read are chosen because they are based on events that would be extremely unlikely to happen in real-life (e.g. Harry Potter), however some fictional books are based on real-life events but have a twist or are developed from true stories.  ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue falls in to latter category, a fictional book inspired by a true story.  This book was particularly fascinating as the story line was gripping and really interesting.  I really liked how it was all written from Jack’s point of view although this did make it quite hard to read and understand in places because of the language he used.  Also, I liked how you got a good setting of what it was like before Jack was born and how Joy ended up in room.  I would definitely recommend this book to someone else, even if they have already seen the film, because you get more information in the book than you do from the film as you hear all of Jack’s thoughts which you don’t get from the movie.  One aspect of the way ‘Room’ that was challenging for me was the way it was written from Jack’s point of view, because he’s only five the language that he used and the way that some of his words were jumbled up or he had the wrong word for certain things was a little confusing.  This meant that when reading the book, it took a little while to into the way in which he spoke, so sometimes I would have to go back and re-read parts again because I hadn’t understood the first time.  I think ‘Room’ has developed my reading skills as it has given me the opportunity to read a book that is unconventionally written in a way that I’ve never seen before (written from a child’s point of view).  This book has inspired me to read more books that are like it, more grown-up and loosely based on true stories.  ‘Room’ was very useful when it came to understanding language acquisition and development as it allowed you to see in context what the certain aspects of language development/acquisition are, for example, over-generalisation.