Related Papers
Reading Research Quarterly
Girls as “Struggling Readers”: Delineating the Sociopolitical and Sociocultural Terrains of Books and Reading
2009 •
Jennifer M Graff
Review of Reading girls: The lives and literacies of adolescents.
2013 •
Michelle M Falter
English in Education
Young People Reading - Review
2020 •
John Hodgson
Evelyn Arizpe and Gabrielle Cliff Hodges have brought together recent studies of young people reading in widely different contexts around the world, from Europe, Canada, South America, Africa and the Middle East. Many of the young people encountered in this book read in multilingual contexts where the study of both language and literature are subject to governmental influence. Some of them speak of their reading in school, either above or below the desk. Others speak of out-of-school reading in a range of modes, including comics and online. Some read in precarious or potentially violent circ*mstances. The writers go to great lengths to explain and justify their research methods, which are as varied as required by the range of situations they report. In several cases, it is evident that the research itself offered educational and personal support to the participants, as they discussed their reading and life experiences with the researcher and each other.
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI
Teens and Pleasure Reading: A Taxonomy of Young Teen Readers
Vivian Howard
The English Journal
Young Adult Literature: Dear Teachers: Please Help My Kids Become Readers
1999 •
Chris Crowe
What Adolescents Are Reading and What Their Teachers Are Not: Between the Deformed Discourse and Disdain of the Graphic Novel
2007 •
Phil Fitzsimmons
A first foray: An introduction to one form of high school reading and readers It was only at the beginning of this year that I realised that I had spent all of my teaching and research life talking with children under the age of twelve years, and even within this group it was mostly with children under six. While I had come to understand a great deal about literacy acquisition (Geekie, Cambourne and Fitzsimmons 1999) and elementary school reading development (Harris, Turbill, Fitzsimmons and McKenzie 2001), as my own teenage daughter constantly reminded me, all I knew was 'ankle-biter speak'. Determined to change this, I began working with a group of students in a local high school investigating what they were reading and how they were reading, an area that would appear be relatively ambiguous (Signorini 2002) and ill-defined (Manzo 2004). The voices of these high school students have been inserted in this paper as part of an interrogative frame in an attempt to undertake an...
Teenagers and Reading
Don Carter
Young People's Relationships with Reading
Donna Alvermann
Teenagers Reading Fiction
Alkisti Chronaki
We all live in a world of stories. We tell and listen to narratives in order to give body to our experience and make ourselves more visible to ourselves and others. This ability to make up stories and recount our experience appears very early in life since children realize at a young age that storytelling can be a powerful tool for understanding the world, patterning the chaos of experience, becoming part of their culture, making and keeping friends, constructing a self. The ability of making up stories, however, seems to decline by the time a child reaches the age of 8 or 9. So, when she reaches adolescence it may well have been completely lost even though the need of an adolescent to familiarize herself with what is contingent, to come to terms with the unexpected as well as to explore herself and others, define and redefine who she is, who she might become and how the world might be, is more imperative than ever. This need which a young child satisfies through fiction-making, an adolescent can satisfy through literature, particularly when reading fiction becomes a social process and the reader becomes a member of a community such as a book club. Fiction offers a reader alternative worlds and permits her to explore possibilities and consider options for herself and the world which are not suggested when she takes things as they are. By reading, she enters the thoughts of another person, lets her own self briefly disappear and see the world through the eyes of the imagined self thus gaining different perspectives on what is real. It should not be assumed though that this kind of interaction between reader and text takes place instinctively but it takes some effort and experience from the part of the reader to reach such a reading position. The transition to becoming a skilled reader and adopting an interactive position can be facilitated when the reader is called to discuss, to narrate her reading experience, to pay attention to aspects that she might have overlooked and most important of all to verify the validity of her interpretation. A book club provides the context where such discussions can take place and offers the space for a more expanded reading experience. The participants, by discussing the books they have read, they also talk about themselves and their lives while at the same time they order their experience. This way they reflect both on their lives and on the books along with learning that interpretations are always tentative and that possibilities can be explored from multiple perspectives. The paper is based on a study which is part of my PhD. The survey takes place in the public libraries of Thessaloniki, where book clubs for adolescents between the ages of 11-16 years old have been organized in order to observe their response to fiction and their reading practices. The ‘texts’ produced by the teenagers during the book club meetings constitute the material that is studied and this paper will report some research findings.
Literature in common: reading for pleasure in school reading groups
Teresa Cremin
This chapter considers the reading experiences of voluntary reading groups in schools, their collaborative interpretation of children’s/young adult literature, and their construction of reader identities. We focus on a study of secondary school reading groups in different parts of the UK as they took part in a scheme to ‘shadow’ the judging of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. The groups spent part of the summer term reading and discussing books that were short-listed for one or both of these awards. They were then able to compare their views with those of the judges. Our study of this process was carried out in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), who run the awards and the shadowing scheme and wished to evaluate the success of shadowing. The work was funded by the Carnegie UK Trust. A strong theme that emerged in the study was that, despite their institutional settings and, to some extent, their alignment with curricular priorities (e.g. many were reported as contributing to their school’s literacy strategy) the groups presented themselves as determinedly extracurricular. While reading for pleasure is part of the curricula for English in the UK, group leaders and members saw English as dominated by objectives-led approaches to reading and by assessment. By contrast, reading group experiences were characterized as being about ‘fun’, ‘enjoyment’ and ‘choice’. Groups were partly defined by their contrast with curricular reading, and considerable work went into creating and sustaining this distinctiveness. But also, in a context in which reading is often regarded as ‘geeky’, an activity for ‘boffins’, groups sought to create reading communities in which the pleasure of reading could be shared. In the chapter we consider, in turn, evidence from interviews and conversations with reading group members, and observations and audio-recordings of reading group meetings. In combination, these demonstrate how ‘non-school’ reading practices, relationships and identities are worked at and maintained: both accounted for in talk about reading and enacted within reading group practices.
