Personal response to Room
Throughout my life, I have always been a keen reader. Since around the age of six I was visiting my local library and would work my way through 3-4 books every week, even if I wasn’t properly reading them, so yes, I have always loved reading from a very young age and still do now.
I read to for pleasure when I find the time to read and when I do find the time to read for pleasure, I tend to read crime and thriller books along with mystery and fantasy books such as: The Lovely Bones, Gone Girl, Harry Potter and The Girl on the Train etc. I love reading these sort of texts/genres as I feel part of the story and I feel drawn in to the book. I also like reading these type of fiction texts as I like to see how different authors describe situations, characters and scenes in the book.
As part of my university work, I had the opportunity to read the book ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. I found the book very interesting and intriguing to read. I also enjoyed the book as these are the type of books I like to read with mystery and suspense in them throughout the story. I also enjoyed the book as it gave me a better insight of how some children learn and develop and how some children struggle to develop within certain situations such as neglect and lack of interaction with people and language variations. I also enjoyed the book as it highlighted the importance of interaction with children and how important it is that children need to be involved with different situations and activities, not just confined to a minimal amount of activity and limited interaction within the classroom and outside of the classroom.
I would recommend ‘Room’ to others as I think the book is very interesting and makes you want to keep reading by the nature of the story. I think that other people should read the book as it gives an insight of children’s language development in an informal way that is an accurate perception.
When reading ‘Room’, the language of the book challenged my own language skills as Jack’s language is very disjointed in the book and there are unusual language patterns. This challenged me as I have never read a book like this before. I also felt challenged when reading the book because of the darkness to the story which was quite disturbing in some ways. However, reading ‘Room’ has improved my reading skills in the sense that I feel more confident engaging with texts that are not considered normal or contain normal language patterns that may be harder to understand at first.
Reading ‘Room’ has encouraged me to read other novels of this nature as I found the book very interesting and relevant to the course I am studying. Although I do read novels already, I have never read a book like this before and thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. I will definitely be reading more books like this in future.
I only ever considered academic reading to be textbooks and journals, I never realised that these kinds of books would help with my learning at university. ‘Room’ was a very effective and useful text to engage with when learning about language acquisition and development as the book showed both sides of language development in the sense of positive and negative. For example, the book shows the negative side of language development if children are not exposed to a wide range of language and interaction. This is shown by using disjointed language. The positive aspect of language acquisition and development is then shown through Jack’s positive language development after he leaves ‘Room’. This is useful as it shows the challenges that some children may face/the different situations children are in at home which could impact on their development both inside and outside the classroom. The book also helps us to realise as future teacher’s that there may be other reasons why children are not grasping things within our classroom.
