Are Teens Reading More?
This entry is based on the article, “Teens Buying Books at Fastest Rate in Years,” mentioned in the March 23 edition of the Instructional Technology Update. As a teacher, what are your experiences with the reading habits of your students? Leave your thoughts below!
What a fabulous article! Thanks for sharing! Our circulation is going through the roof at SMS, thanks in large part to the increasing interest in reading by our 8th and 9th graders.
The young adult lit sections in bookstores and public libraries used to be miniscule in comparison to the other sections. YA’s were truly slighted. The rationale at the time is that they simply do not read, and it wasn’t worth taking up the physical space. With the explosion of “chick lit” for teens who have flocked to the shelves to devour it, and the surge of quality fantasy, science fiction, espionage and graphic novels, all genders are covered.
Harry Potter is responsible for keeping the reading habit alive in teens, where previously their interested waned. It’s all about keeping up the habit--and our students at SMS have it.
The challenge for me is housing literature for 6th grade and 9th grade in the same space. The edgy YA literature is not age-appropriate for the young ones. I walk a tightrope steering 11-year-olds to more appropriate reading material while continuing to encourage and advertise reading material for our older students.
Posted by on 03/23 at 07:15 AMI do see an increase in our middle school students’ reading, especially realistic fiction, nonfiction, and still fantasy. Would love to see even more, but we just keep pushing every kind of reading material at them and hope something grabs them! We just introduced a few graphic novels to the collection so it will be interesting to see what happens with those.
Posted by on 03/23 at 10:53 AMKids who read for leisure also tend to become self-sufficient users of the library. They still roam the library looking for good books and beg we librarians for certain author’s titles, but with resources like Novelist and magazines and web sources that include sections about new books and media they have better access to resources to know what they are looking for. The general public recognizing that YA lit has an important place probably helps, too. Some of the books cited in the article are ones that have won The National Book Award for YA, which is a fairly new category.
There are some sophisticated texts out there that students are trying, too. For example, verse novels and biographies have not only been winning awards, but the kids are looking for another book like Creech’s Love that Dog or Hesse’s Out of the Dust. What they don’t always realize is that this kind of text experience is actually connecting them with the kind of reading that was practiced several hundred years ago with long narrative epic poetry.
And a teen favorite— graphic novels—offer some richly layered texts that challenge readers in ways we haven’t traditionally measured. That’s probably the greatest impact—that we as professionals are recognizing that there are treasures within what was once considered low-brow reading. It wasn’t so long ago that fantasy and science fiction were in that situation and look how those titles have taken off, spurred by the success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. After all, the greatest motivating factor is to have a choice in what you read!
I use the Pa Young Reader’s choice Award titles to help elementary students experience various genres and begin to develop their articulation of what kinds of texts they like and why.
Posted by on 03/26 at 10:03 AMIn my experience, Reading Counts has made a difference in students’ choices in reading and their varied reading experiences. For those who don’t read for pleasure outside of the classroom, simply reading even smaller books and picture books is allowing an increase in fluency and comprehension. Those who do read and have a favored genre are willing more and more to discuss their reading, share their own strategies, and recommend, as Dorian says, the “edgy” reading material that seems to be so popular with some students today. I think the YA genre has been increasingly responsive to the reality that kids are exposed to and want to see in their choice of reading material. They often want to read about themselves and those they know in literature, and that is part of their engagement, and part of teachers’ need to keep up.
Posted by on 03/29 at 09:33 AM
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