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Reading Interests
Catherine Sheldrick Ross
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London,
Ontario, Canada
Abstract
"Reading interests" refers variously to the following: an individual's interest in doing reading itself, as
demonstrated by the amount of actual reading done; what a reader wants to read "about" as expressed by a
list of topics or subject areas or genres that the reader reads by preference; or the elements in a text,
sometimes referred to as appeal factors, that engage a particular reader with a text. Apart from examining
bestseller lists and circulation records, two of the most direct ways to find out about reading interests are
to ask the readers themselves and to ask the writers who have demonstrated their ability to interest readers
by writing popular, bestselling books. Research on reading interests foregrounds the individual reader,
whose interests, choices, tastes, reading behaviors, reading competencies, opportunities, frustrations, and
pleasures in reading are given a starring role.
INTRODUCTION
Like the related terms "reading habits" and "reading mo-
tivation," the term "reading interests" has the appearance
of a stable trait—reading interests shows up in the titles of
numerous research studies and has achieved the status of
subject descriptor in indexes. Depending on who is asking
the question, reading interests refers variously to the fol-
lowing: an individual's interest in doing reading itself,
as measured by the amount of reading actually done; what
a reader wants to read "about" as expressed by a list of
topics or subject areas or genres that the reader reads
by preference; or the elements within a text, sometimes
referred to as "appeal factors," that engage a particular
reader with a text. Reading comprehension, though a dif-
ferent concept, is nevertheless related to reading interests.
Whatever else it may mean, reading interest entails a
necessary element of engagement, as the reader makes
meaning from the black marks on the page.
Apart from examining bestseller lists and circulation
records, two of the most direct ways to find out about
reading interests are to ask the readers themselves and to
ask the writers who have demonstrated their ability to inter-
est readers by writing popular, bestselling books. Wilkie
Collins, friend of Charles Dickens and popular nineteenth
century novelist, said that the secret was to "Make 'em cry,
make 'em laugh, make 'em wait." By the early 1970s, there
was already a substantial body of scholarship on reading
interests summarized in Alan Purves and Richard Beach's
Literature and the Reader. Purves and Beach
[1]
sort re-
search on reading interests into three categories: 1) the
reading interests themselves, which are broken down to
include "interests in content, interests in form, amount of
reading and interests, book difficulty and interests, and
literary quality and interests; 2) personal determinants of
interests which are taken to be "age, sex, intelligence,
reading ability, attitude, and psychological needs"; and 3)
institutional determination of interests which are taken to be
"availability of books, socioeconomic and ethnic determi-
nants, peer, parent, and teacher influences, and television
and movies as determinants."
On examination, concepts such as reading interests/
habits/attitudes/motivation/choices/preferences are hard
to pin down and hard to distinguish. One thing we can
say is that research on reading interests and cognate
areas foregrounds the individual reader, whose interests,
choices, tastes, reading behaviors, reading competencies,
opportunities, frustrations, and pleasures in reading are
given a starring role. In a nutshell, this field of research is
reader-centered, in contrast with text-centered approaches
that focus on the literary work or with structural app-
roaches that focus on the social milieu in which the text is
produced, distributed, taken up, and used. It puts the spot-
light on reading itself within the broader communication
circuit that includes the text, the author, the publisher,
bookstores, libraries as well as social and technological
factors such as copyright regimes, censorship, educational
institutions, and technologies of printing and distribu-
tion.
[2]
It privileges the cognitive and emotional responses
of readers themselves and pays special attention to volun-
tary reading rather than required or assigned reading. It is
interested in the "why" and "how" of reading as well as in
the "who" and "what."
Why be concerned about reading interests? One an-
swer lies in the link between reading interests, literacy
acquisition and the demands for enhanced literacy on
citizens of knowledge-based economies and societies.
From studies of literacy acquisition, we know that readers
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition DOI: 10.1081/E-ELIS3-120043679
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learn to read by doing a lot of reading.
[3]
And what keeps
beginning readers reading through the thousands and
thousands of hours it takes to become a practiced reader?
It's the pleasure of the experience itself—what some
researchers call "intrinsic motivation." So in the field of
education and literacy studies as well as in the field
of librarianship, there is the desire to know what factors
motivate people to want to read, help them acquire the
reading habit, and keep them reading across the lifespan.
The term reading interests points to a key question: what
kinds of reading materials/types of stories/kinds of experi-
ences give people sufficient pleasure that they choose to
continue reading rather than put the reading material
down in favor of some competing activity?
But almost from the beginning reading interests turned
out to be a surprisingly complex phenomenon to tease out
from other factors and pin down. In the first heyday of
library-based, scientific studies of reading, centered at
the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago
in the 1930s under the leadership of Douglas Waples,
reading interests tended to be thought of as something
that preexisted—a causal factor that preceded reading.
Researchers asked people to indicate their interests from
a set of topics such as history, biology, economics, poli-
tics, government, personal hygiene, etc. that could be
satisfied by reading nonfiction books on the topic
[4]
and
that therefore predicted (or ought to predict) reading
choices. In
Au1 more recent reading research, especially in
the field of LIS, reading interest is more apt to be seen as
the positive engagement that occurs during a reading
transaction when there is an appropriate match between
reader and text. This appropriate match often involves a
number of intersecting considerations, including the
amount of background knowledge needed by the reader
to comprehend the text. It turns out that for some readers,
the topic is key—there are readers who will read almost
anything written about flying or about cooking or about
sailing. But for many others, topic turns out to be one
factor among many, some others being the feel or the
book (upbeat and life-affirming or ironic and critical),
pacing (a quick read or a dense, detailed text), setting
(similar to the reader's everyday experience or very dif-
ferent), and the demands on the reader made by the lan-
guage and literary conventions used.
[5]
While studies of reading interests foreground the ac-
tive role of the reader in making choices and acting on
preferences, it has also been recognized for a longtime
that there is an interplay between the interests and choices
of individual readers and the availability of reading mate-
rial that reaches readers through the various gatekeeping
channels provided by intermediaries—e.g., publishers'
choices of what to publish and later to advertise as well
as the decisions of bookstores and libraries of what to
stock and make available. As early as the 1930s, land-
mark studies by Douglas Waples and Leon A. Carnovsky
explored the relationship between expressed reading
interests and actual reading as part of a larger research
agenda on reading and libraries summarized helpfully by
Stephen Karetsky.
[6]
Carnovsky's Library Quarterly arti-
cle, "A Study of the Relationship Between Reading Inter-
est and Actual Reading,"
[7]
for example, reports that book
readers tend to read most in areas in which they have
previously reported most interest, but only when such
books are as accessible, as well-advertised, and as read-
able as other books. In other words, availability and ac-
cessibility can trump interest.
RESEARCH APPROACHES TO STUDYING
READING INTERESTS
A problem for researchers of course is that reading inter-
ests cannot be observed directly. They can, however, be
inferred from what people "say" about reading in letters,
diaries, and Web-postings and in response to surveys,
questionnaires, and interviews as well as from what they
"do" through their book-buying, book-borrowing, and par-
ticipation in book clubs and reading groups. Each of these
research approaches is partial and has its own limitations.
Bestseller lists and circulation statistics tell us what is sold
or borrowed, not what is read or how it is read. Autobio-
graphies, diaries, letters, and to some extent even margi-
nalia are composed with an audience in mind of future
readers by whom the writer hopes to be viewed in a favor-
able light. Small case studies based on interviews or
ethnographic observation of individual readers may be
idiosyncratic and not representative of general patterns.
Large scale questionnaires using national samples are gen-
eralizable but tell us only about averages and not about
any actual reader. Nevertheless, taken together, a growing
body of research using different research methods from
different disciplines, including education, sociology, his-
tory, psychology, literary history and library, and informa-
tion science has achieved considerable understanding of
the reading interests of readers of the past and present.
Historians and literary scholars have taken the lead in
studying readers from periods before the twentieth cen-
tury. Literary historians have paid most attention to the
reading interests of elite readers, in particular of canonical
authors. They examine these authors' texts for evidence
of literary borrowings and verbal echoes and they track
down the books held in authors' personal libraries in
the hope of finding underlinings of significant passages
and marginalia indicating reader response. Bibliophile
Nicholas A. Basbanes
[8]
has written entertainingly on
studies that examine the "silent witnesses" to reading
provided by library collections such as Leon Edel and
Adeline R. Tintner's The Library of Henry James
[9]
or that
focus on marginalia, such as the six volumes of Coler-
idge's marginalia published as part of a Princeton Univer-
sity Press project to publish all of Coleridge's writings.
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The burgeoning field of history of the book, or "histoire
du livre," has expanded our understanding of the reading
interests and experiences of ordinary readers from various
historical periods and geographical areas. In her introduc-
tion to a theme issue in Library Quarterly on retrieving
the reading experiences of ordinary readers by means of
library records, Christine Pawley
[10]
observed, "Still, some
readers are more difficult to recover than others. Especially
hard to access are the reading choices and practices of
millions of 'common readers,' those with relatively anony-
mous lives and whom archival collections tend to ignore."
Using census records, library catalogs and circulation
records, subscription lists, estate inventories, advertise-
ments, printing and transportation records, autobiogra-
phies, diaries, letters and other traces, book historians
have tried to recreate a detailed picture of the what and
how of reading of people in various different times and
places. A notable example is William Gilmore's Reading
Becomes a Necessity of Life,
[11]
which examines transfor-
mations in reading in rural New England from 1780 to
1835, as reading materials in the home grew from a Bible
and Farmers' Almanac to an expanded mix of newspapers,
periodicals and books, including fiction. Readers' letters to
authors and to publishers have also proved a fruitful source
of evidence of reading experience and reception. For ex-
ample, Robert Darnton
[12]
reconstructed the Rousseauistic
reading of Jean Ranson, an eighteenth century provincial
French merchant, by examining his letters to the Societe
´
Typographique de Neufchatel, a Swiss publisher of French
books. Similarly, James Smith Allen's study
[13]
of fiction
reading in France was based in part on voluminous
archives of letters sent by a privileged readership of
acquaintances to 10 French authors.
Marginalia has proved an unexpectedly rich resource
for investigating ordinary reading. Cathy Davidson's ac-
count of nineteenth century American novel readers was
based, among other sources, on the marginalia inscribed
in copies of early American novels. About well-used
books, she notes, "Broken boards, turned-down pages,
and abounding marginalia . . . reveal patterns of reading,
patterns of use, the surviving traces of an interpretive
community long-since gone" through which "some of the
early readers remain surprisingly vivid even after nearly
two centuries."
[14]
English Professor Heather Jackson,
in particular, has been a seeker-out of marginalia of all
kinds, by exceptional celebrated readers and by common
anonymous readers alike. An editor of the Coleridge proj-
ect, she confesses, "Coleridge's marginalia converted me
to writing in books."
[15]
In Marginalia , she examined
some 3000 books annotated in English by various readers
from 1700 to 2000 and made the claim that marginalia
can contribute to the history of reading by revealing codes
of reading of the period as well as recovering the experi-
ences of individual readers.
As we move to the twentieth century, an expanded
array of research methods have become available to
investigate contemporary reading interests. Using tools
developed for surveys and polling, a large body of work
focuses on the "what" of reading interests, often with the
help of checklists, reading inventories, or questionnaires.
Survey research uncovers broad patterns by correlating
various aspects of reading (amount of reading in various
formats, preferred genres, reasons for reading, and source
of reading materials) with demographic variables of sex,
age, educational level, or occupational group. In contrast,
ethnographic research based on in-depth interviews or
case studies of individual readers provide a fine-grained
picture of reading interests in the context of the reader's
life. A notable example is Janice Radway's Reading the
Romance, which used a combination of individual and
group interviews and questionnaires to understand the
reading experiences of romance readers. Although the
term reading interests is nowhere to be found in the index,
the entire book in fact explores the special satisfaction that
romance reading provides to romance fans. Radway says,
"This theme of romance reading as a special gift a woman
gives herself dominated most of the interviews."
[16]
Also
using interviews with readers, in Children Talk About
Books,
[17]
Donald Fry presents vivid case studies of six
child readers as the grounded starting point for discussing
familiar themes relating to reading interests: why readers
choose to repeat the experience through many rereadings
of a favorite book; the role of strong topical interest in
motivating a reader to stretch beyond his usual comfort
level; the attraction of series books such as those by Enid
Blyton; the enjoyment of story; the popularity of genre
fiction such as horror stories; and the move from chil-
dren's fiction into adult books.
Talking to actual readers, rather than generalizing from
one's own experience, is especially important in the case of
children and young adults. As Holly Virginia Blackford
notes in Out of this World :
[18]
"How children themselves
produce meaning is a particularly crucial area of study be-
cause child readers are, by definition, colonial subjects of a
genre that is controlled by layers of adults and adult institu-
tions (writers, publishers, marketers, critics, bookstores,
libraries, educators, parents, and producers and marketers of
commercial products and multimedia adaptations)." Black-
ford herself interviewed 33 girls, ages 8–16, from California
and New Jersey, expecting to find that young female readers
do identity work by reading fictional representations of char-
acters like themselves and identifying with the protagonists.
To her surprise, she found that despite "differences in race,
class, age, family circumstances, reading preferences, and
reading abilities, the girls' reading practices reveal a consis-
tent pattern. They read for a good story, and a good story
means one that they are 'not' living—that actually looks
'nothing' like the life they know."
[18]
From an accumulating body of research, certain gener-
alizations have been robust. Almost everyone in wester-
nized countries "can" read—95% or more of young adults
are proficient at basic reading tasks;
[19]
the problem is that
Reading Interests 3
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too few readers are proficient at the more demanding
reading tasks that are increasingly required in a knowl-
edge-based society. Despite widespread belief that literacy
skills are falling from some earlier golden age of reading,
performance on literacy tests tell a different story. For
example, the Canadian Reading the Future
[20]
found that
there is an enormous improvement in literacy for those
educated after World War II in comparison with those
who completed their education before the war. Studies
conducted over the last 50 years have been remarkably
consistent in showing that the vast majority of the popu-
lation reads something, about half the population reads
books, and about 10–15% are avid readers. Occupation
group and educational level are more important than age
when it comes to predicting whether or not a person is a
book reader. Younger people tend to read more than those
over age 50; college-educated people and people with
higher annual incomes tend to read more than those with-
out a college education or with lower incomes; whites read
more than nonwhites.
[21]
Gender makes a difference at all ages: girls and women
have reading histories different from those of boys and
men. Researchers report that from as young as 2 years old
boys and girls display different preferences, with boys
preferring scary fairytales and girls preferring romantic
ones—preferences extended into adult preferences where
men read more westerns, adventure, and science fiction
and women read more romance. Boys enjoy information
books, humor, action stories, and science fiction, with
Harry Potter books enjoying phenomenal success, even
among those who normally don't enjoy reading.
[22]
Sum-
marizing research on gender and literacy, Smith and
Wilhelm
[23]
note, among other things, that girls understand
narrative texts and most expository texts significantly bet-
ter than boys do; that boys value reading as an activity less
than do girls; and significantly more boys than girls call
themselves nonreaders. To build guy-friendly school li-
brary collections, Patrick Jones and his colleagues
[24]
rec-
ommend spending a little less on novels and investing in
magazines, graphic novels, comics, joke books, newspa-
pers, books with colored illustrations, and nonfiction in
areas of high interest such as sports, vehicles, etc. On
average, girls learn to read sooner than boys and with more
facility; they read more and they are more apt than boys to
report that they enjoy reading for pleasure. As school age
readers get older, there is a steady decline in the percen-
tages of both boys and girls who say they enjoy reading and
do it voluntarily for fun, with an accelerated drop-off
around age 12 or 13. Among adult readers, women read
more than men, particularly more fiction. Women are
much more likely than men to belong to reading groups or
book clubs: Jenny Hartley found that about 65% of reading
groups are women, 28% mixed, and 6% men only.
[25]
Elizabeth Long's booklength study of white women's
reading groups in Houston, Texas
[26]
suggests that, for
these women, reading is fundamentally a social activity
and book club participation a way of reflecting on the
meaning of their lives in relation to others.
Reading preferences are idiosyncratic and individualis-
tic, emerging from what Ruth Strang
[27]
has called "a
central core or radix" that determines any individual's
pattern of reading. Popular fiction, particularly detective
fiction/mystery, science fiction/fantasy, and romance,
accounts for a large proportion of what people say they
like reading as well as what they actually do buy and
borrow. An interest in reading materials is positioned
within a larger network of media consumption and for
many readers is stimulated or reinforced by tie-ins with
comics, music, movies, television, or videogames.
[28]
Readers develop an awareness of popular literary genres
by paying attention to the craft of storytelling across me-
dia, learning how, say, fantasy works by experiencing
instances of the fantasy genre in books, films, television
shows, and videogames.
[29]
Although we may think of
reading as a solitary activity, social elements are power-
ful influences. Relationships with family, teachers, and
friends are important factors in fostering reading and in
influencing what materials are read.
[30]
Studies of reading
interests of students of all ages repeatedly have found a
disconnect between reader interests and the traditional
canon entrenched in the high school literature curriculum
in U.S. schools
[31,32]
where To Kill a Mockingbird , Huck-
leberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter remain common
choices. Not surprisingly, readers are more likely to find
books which they have chosen themselves more interest-
ing than they find assigned reading; furthermore high
interest increases ease of comprehension.
[33]
Because so much of the research on reading interests
has depended on a questionnaire or checklist, it is worth
taking a look in more detail at the types of instruments
used. Typically researchers elicit basic demographic in-
formation (including grade level for school age subjects),
ask for the title of the last book read in whole or in part,
and ask respondents to complete a checklist or reading
interest inventory. "When given the opportunity to read
any kind of book you choose, what kind of books do you
read. Chose one" (or sometimes two or three):
1. science fiction;
2. fantasy;
3. horror;
4. mystery/thrillers;
5. adventure;
6. western;
7. romance/love stories;
8. biography/autobiography;
9. literary fiction;
10. sports;
11. true life;
12. historical;
13. humor;
14. other (please explain).
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Such research based on self-reports is subject to all the
usual problems of inexact memory and a lack of shared
understanding of the meaning of terms. Is "true life" on
this checklist intended as a synonym for nonfiction or
does it mean a realistic novel, set in a familiar setting
and focused on real life problems? Does "historical" in-
clude historical fiction such as regency romances or war
stories or does it refer only to nonfictional historical
accounts? As noted by Purves and Beach,
[33]
"Adventure
as a category may have a number of interpretations (ac-
tion, suspense, violence, faraway places, and manliness),
and the researcher's conception of adventure may be far
from the respondents' and one respondent's from an-
other." These typical problems of survey research are
exacerbated in the case of reading by biases introduced
by the value society places on certain kinds of sanctioned
reading and denies to other kinds of reading which are
denigrated if not out and out forbidden. Often the only
format asked about is books. Reading magazines, news-
papers, fanzines, comics, manga, or Web sites does not
count as real reading in most of these studies, although we
know that, especially for adolescent boys, these formats
are preferred sources of reading pleasure.
[34,35]
Research
that compiles lists of favorite books or recently read
books is likely, especially in the case of students, to re-
flect the composition of readily available sources of
books, such as school-sponsored book clubs and accessi-
ble school library or classroom collections.
READING ENGAGEMENT, BOREDOM, AND
COMPREHENSION
The flip side of reading interest is reading boredom. In On
Being Literate, Margaret Meek
[36]
says that we need to
pay more attention to what beginning readers think they
are doing when they read: "Here, again, their boredom is
a clue because it manifests itself in their disinclination
to continue. When they are bored they shut the book."
Boredom, argues Meek,
[36]
is frequently the result of a
misalignment between the reader and the text or the
learner and the task; boring texts are usually either too
difficult or too easy for the reader. Texts can be too hard
when they require preliminary knowledge that the reader
doesn't have—either knowledge of the way stories work
or of the way the world works—because making meaning
out of texts involves fitting what is read into the pattern of
what is already known. In any case, what is missing when
readers describe books as boring is the element of engage-
ment.
Victor Nell
[37]
used the experimental methods of cog-
nitive psychology to investigate the conditions of reader
engagement, using terms like "arousal," "reading involve-
ment," and "entrancement" to describe the experience of
the engaged reader. Experimental subjects who read for
pleasure (ludic readers) were asked read in a laboratory
setting an enjoyable book that they chose themselves.
Meanwhile subjects were attached to electrodes that
recorded heart rate, muscle activity, skin response, and
breathing—the variables measured as indicators of arousal.
Among other findings, Nell discovered that levels of
arousal were higher during ludic reading than during work
reading, despite the fact that the readers themselves experi-
enced the pleasure reading as effortless. The paradox of
ludic reading is that deep engagement and high physiologi-
cal arousal go hand-in-hand with the reader's sense of
effortlessness, where the words on the page drops from
consciousness as the reader is absorbed into the world of
the book.
The interesting–boring continuum turns out to be a key
theme in understanding frustrated readers who have trou-
ble "getting into" a book. When Anne Reeves set out to
understand resistant student readers who did not share her
own sense of reading as a joyful activity, she conducted
in-depth interviews with 25 adolescent readers in grades
9–12 and developed fine-grained case studies of five of
these readers. Asked what comes to mind when they hear
"reading," most said the literature studied in English
class. These resistant readers all insisted that 1) they
could read and 2) that they did read when they were
interested in the text. Since most school reading did not
interest them, they had developed more or less successful
strategies to avoid it, including watching the film, asking
someone to tell them what happened in a "novel" on the
English curriculum, or using Cliff notes. Their most com-
mon advice from her 25 interviewees to teachers was
"Choose interesting stuff. Don't try to make us read bor-
ing stuff."
[38]
As Reeves notes, these students view inter-
est as a stable commodity that resides in a text, something
that the author can choose either to include or to leave
out. They thought of interestingness as something "out-
side over there," not as a product of their own relationship
with the text and dependent on their own activity.
Reeves found that readers call a book boring when it
requires them to take risks, when the readers' sense of
competence is called into question by a reading task that
is too challenging, when the world represented in the
book is threatening or painful, or when readers don't have
the necessary background knowledge to make sense of the
text. Similarly, in their study of 49 adolescent boys, Smith
and Wilhelm
[34]
emphasize the crucial importance for
readers to have a sense of competence and control in
reading; when the boys in their study felt "overmatched"
by the reading task, they stopped reading. "Boring" turns
out to be a catchall term to describe a negative reading
experience, however, produced. For example, in Reeves'
study, Duke, a 17-year-old high school senior, described
as "boring" the YA book Go Ask Alice (1971), which was
assigned in one of his English classes. Duke explained:
"I don't like readin' depressin' stuff. Her life just started
gettin' worse and worse. ... It's bringing me down."
[39]
In
the same study, Joel, a 15-year-old student in grade10,
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chose to read Stephen King's Cujo (1994) for an English
class assignment. He picked Cujo because he had heard
that King is interesting and because the book itself is "not
too long." However, Cujo did not live up to its promise:
Joel found himself at sea because of King's strategy of
introducing multiple sets of characters in small introduc-
tory scenes, switching rapidly to new scenes, and new sets
of characters who are apparently unrelated to previously
presented ones: "It's just he goes on from one thing, you
start reading, and it's like switch to a different thing, and
I just kinda got lost about what was going on."
[39]
Joel
had not read enough complex fiction to have learned that
when it's not clear how scenes, characters, or events fit
together, you don't start over again at the beginning
and read more slowly; you press on because you know
the pattern of significance will eventually be revealed.
Successful reading of prose fiction depends on knowing
what Peter Rabinowitz has called the "rules of reading":
these rules "serve as a kind of assumed contract between
author and reader—they specify the grounds on which the
intended reading should take place."
[40]
And how do read-
ers learn these rules of engagement with texts? Most often
through reading texts themselves, starting with highly
patterned fictions such as fairy tales, series books, and
genre books that make the design clear.
READING INTERESTS: HIGH AND LOW
Some scholars have been disheartened by one seemingly
intractable fact about reading interests: a majority of read-
ers, when given the chance to choose, prefers a good story
told in an accessible style to a literary classic. There are
more readers for Harlequin romances than for Middle-
march and more readers for thrillers than for serious po-
etry. When transformations in the technology of printing
and distribution, the power-driven cylinder press, new
paper-making machinery, cheap postal rates, and a new
railway system dramatically lowered costs and made
reading materials affordable to a mass audience in the
second-half of the nineteenth century in North America,
people turned out to want to read cheap popular fiction,
a fact that worried some observers. In The Intellectual
Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose
[41]
notes, "In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, the penny dreadful (cheap crime and horror literature
for boys) created something approaching panic among
middle-class observers, who were certain that it encour-
aged juvenile delinquency." A great deal was written at
the time and following on the theme of cheap books,
trash, rubbish, penny dreadfuls, and sensation novels,
some commentators saying that such materials are harm-
ful because they instill "false views of life" and displace
better reading while others said that they are beneficial
because they introduce readers to the love of reading.
The field of librarianship itself has provided a terrain
for a more than century-long contest between two op-
posed views on what to do about people's reading inter-
ests. Should libraries cater to these interests or try to
change them by improving reading tastes and inculcating
a desire for something better? Advocates of libraries as
a place to serve leisure and recreational readers have
recommended finding out more about readers' interests
in order to provide reading materials that satisfy these
interests. From this perspective, understanding reader
interests provides a foundation for building collections
of popular materials and for effective readers' advisory
service. Advocates of the purely educational function
of libraries have criticized this catering to readers' inter-
ests as a "Give 'em what they want" approach that under-
mines the library's educational mandate and produce
impoverished "drug store" collections.
Esther Jane Carrier's book Fiction in Public Libraries
1876–1900
[42]
provides a well-documented account of
how these opposing arguments played out during the
formative years of public librarianship in North America.
With generous quotes from her nineteenth-century sources,
Carrier examines what eminent librarians said at the
time on such topics as "What is trash?," "High Qual-
ity," and "Reading Improvement." During the nine-
teenth century, there was a strongly held sense of a
natural hierarchy of quality in books in themselves. At
the bottom were materials whose very names signaled
trashiness: penny dreadfuls, dime books, series books,
sensational fiction, and popular romances. Further up
were solid works of literary fiction as well as nonfiction
works that tell a story such as history, biography, or
travel books. At the top were serious, nonnarrative
forms such as philosophy and theology.
The goal for librarians was to push the reader up the
reading ladder from recreational reading to educational
reading.
[43]
William M. Stevenson,
[44]
librarian of the Car-
negie Free Library of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, stirred up
controversy when he removed from the library books he
deemed too low on the reading ladder: books by Horatio
Alger, Bertha M. Clay, May Agnes Fleming, Martha
Finley (the Elsie Books), E. P. Roe, Mrs. E.D.E.N. South-
worth and other popular fiction catering to a taste for
"recreation and entertainment only." In his 1896 and
1897 annual reports, he acknowledged that, since "devo-
tees of this class of literature will read nothing else," it was
inevitable that overall library circulation figures would
drop, but he justified his decision by stating that it is the
unswerving duty of libraries to supply "nothing but good
books" and set a "high standard for reading in a commu-
nity." In Stevenson's view, "As a rule the people who care
for reading nothing but the latest sensational novel cannot
be reached beneficially by the public library. It is a waste
of time and money to try."
[45]
More than a century later, a
strong endorsement of the public library's educational
function can be found elaborated in Dilevko and
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Magowan's Readers' Advisory Service in North American
Public Libraries, 1870–2005. The authors lament the ero-
sion of an earlier age's commitment to a central mission of
"meaningful education through serious and purposeful
learning."
[46]
Regrettably, in their view, public libraries
have become increasingly infiltrated by "a mindset in
which the reading of books, no matter their intrinsic qual-
ity, is construed as good and where discretionary reading
becomes commodified and disposable entertainment, as
manifested principally in genre fiction and genre nonfic-
tion (genre titles), bestsellers, celebrity-authored books,
and prize-winning titles."
[46]
READING THE GENRES
Opponents of this hierarchical view of books and reading
deny that it is useful to open up too wide a gulf between
"high" texts and "low," between high art and "mass"
literature. They point to historical instabilities in the eval-
uation of genres, one century's bestselling popular
authors such as Dickens and Wilkie Collins becoming
canonical works in the next. They argue instead that valu-
able texts are to be found in all media and in many
different genres. Successful reading begins with situating
the text: asking what kind of text this is and what qualities
and effects do we normally expect to find in texts of this
type. The publication of Betty Rosenberg's Genreflecting:
A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction
[47,48]
can
be seen as a watershed event within the LIS field that
legitimized a nonhierarchical way of looking at texts.
Rosenberg's First Law of Reading, "Never apologize for
your reading tastes," included in all six editions of Genre-
flecting, shifts the emphasis to the tastes and reading
interests of the reader.
In a simple breakthrough, Genreflecting solved for
librarians the intractable problem of trying to find a single
ladder of quality on which all books can be arranged.
Instead Genreflecting takes the approach of helping readers
situate a given text within its own literary genre, so that
comparisons of quality are made "within" a genre not be-
tween types of literature that aim at quite different effects.
The western is about facing death in an environment
stripped down to its bare essentials; the horror story is
about scaring the reader; the speculative science fiction
story is about "What if?"; the romance is about the devel-
oping love relationship of two central characters and the
guaranteed happy ending; the mystery story is about unco-
vering a secret. Since each genre attempts to provide dif-
ferent satisfactions, comparisons are more useful within
a genre than across genres. The helpful questions to ask
about a particular work become: what are the qualities,
effects, and literary conventions that distinguish this partic-
ular genre? who are the outstanding exemplars of the craft
of writing in this genre? what is it about these exemplars
that appeal so strongly to readers who enjoy this genre?
how well does this particular work compare with the best
examples of the genre in delivering these satisfactions?
An approach to understanding reading interests by
studying popular genres has gathered momentum. Robert
Scholes defines a literary genre as "a sort of template,
used by both writers and readers, to allow for relatively
rapid composition and comprehension. That is, a writer
composing a text in a recognized genre begins with a
template, a preexisting form, that leaves certain blanks
to be filled in."
[49]
This template includes a set of formal
qualities that we recognize as typical of the genre and
that together work to provide the reader with a predict-
able experience of pleasure. These formal qualities are
like the elements of what Wittgenstein called "family
resemblance"—features such as a high-bridged nose or
wide-set eyes or red hair that show up in generations of
family portraits even though one does not need to find
that nose or any other particular feature to identify a
portrait as belong to the family. In the case of the West-
ern, for example, the set of stock features, as described
by John Cawelti
[50]
and Jane Tompkins,
[51]
are as forma-
lized as those of the commedia del arte or the Petrarchan
sonnet. These features include the frontier setting in big
sky country of desert, prairie, or mountain; characters
such as good and bad gunmen, the solitary outsider who
rides into town, the schoolmarm, plucky widow, and
saloon girl, the saloon owner, broken-down doctor, cow-
boy, cattle baron, cavalry officer, scout, Indian, and of
course the horse; and plot devices such as betrayal, re-
venge, retaliatory violence, Indian captivity, the chase,
lynching, train robbery, range war, and the show-down
or shoot-out.
Blackford
[52]
reports that the girls in her study are
so familiar with generic conventions "that they identify
those conventions as 'rules': 'Now, there's ... certain
rules that you have to have in horror stories, like when-
ever you turn around there's always somebody there, it
always has to be nighttime in a thunderstorm, and some-
thing scary happens.' " The genre book, when it is suc-
cessful, embodies the familiar elements but in a new way,
providing the reader with a satisfying mix of the familiar
and the unexpected. Joyce G. Saricks's The Readers' Ad-
visory Guide to Genre Fiction
[53]
provides a very helpful
overview of 15 different genres and their characteristic
appeal, including for each genre five exemplary authors
and titles that are good starting points for exploring the
genre. Libraries Unlimited have followed up their wildly
successful Genreflecting with a series of guides to reading
interests, edited by Diana Tixier Herald, that focus specif-
ically on particular genres such as fantasy, mystery, hor-
ror, adventure/suspense, historical fiction, romance, or
mainstream fiction. Another useful form of introduction
to rules governing popular literary genres come from
bestselling writers themselves who provide an insider's
view of the genre and its appeal to readers, for example,
Sue Grafton's edited collection of essays on writing
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mysteries,
[54]
Jayne Ann Krentz's edited collection Dan-
gerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers
on the Appeal of Romance,
[55]
and Orson Scott Card's
guide to writing science fiction and fantasy.
[56]
As Scholes points out, the genre template serves the
needs of writers by providing a ready-made structure and
serves the needs of readers by helping them find their
bearings in a book, once reading has begun. Readers use
their familiarity with the rules of genre fiction to predict
what could possibly happen in a new book they pick up—
whether it will scare them or reassure them or amaze
them or present them with a mystery to be solved. And
of course publishers, who know that readers use genre as
a filter in choosing books to read, package books in covers
that provide strong generic cues including color-coded
covers in green for fantasy, sandy gold for westerns,
shades of pink for romance, and black for horror. Some
cultural theorists argue that genre readers are dupes of
corporate publishing interests, which provide only the
appearance of choice while selling a standardized, mass-
produced, cheap commodity that appeals to spurious grat-
ifications and emotional appeals. The test case has been
the romance, which is the most denigrated of all the
genres. Romance accounts for a huge percentage of book
sales—one-quarter of all books sold and 40% of mass
paperback sales, according to the Romance Writers of
America Web site.
[57]
The Romance Writers of American
note that in 2006 there were approximately 6400 romance
titles released, generating 1.37 billion in estimated reve-
nue. In her introduction to Dangerous Men and Adventur-
ous Women , Krentz describes romance as a fantasy of
female empowerment in which the woman always wins:
"In romance the success of an individual author is ...
[based] on how compellingly she can create her fantasy
and on how many readers discover they can step into it
with her for a couple of hours." Krentz argues that readers
have no difficulty distinguishing the inevitably happy
endings of the fantasy from the reality of their everyday
experience. They "choose" to enter the romance world for
a couple of hours to experience a reaffirmation of hope
and the importance of loving human relationships.
READERS' ADVISORY AND APPEAL FACTORS
Understanding reading interests has been considered
foundational for readers' advisory work as it has been
practiced in public libraries since the early 1980s. Mela-
nie Kimball's chapter on the history of readers' advisory
in the sixth edition of Genreflecting
[58]
describes what she
calls a "complete overhaul" of readers' advisory service.
She identifies several significant milestones in the forma-
tion of the new breed of readers' advisor as someone who
understands reading interests and can "recommend fiction
reading, particularly genre fiction." Among these mile-
stones were the already-mentioned first edition of
Genreflecting, Joyce Saricks and Nancy Brown's Read-
ers' Advisory Service in the Public Library,
[59]
Ted Bal-
com's Book Discussion Guide for Adults: A Leader's
Guide,
[60]
and the formation of the Adult Reading Round
Table in Chicago in 1984, a group of librarians who met
to foster the study of reading interests and popular genres
of fiction. Because fiction accounts for such a large share
of popular reading, readers' advisory work focused initi-
ally on popular genres of fiction and their appeal factors.
By the 1990s, however, the scope of readers' advisory
service was expanding to include popular nonfiction
which can be read for pleasure, specifically those nonfic-
tion works with a strong sense of story, such as travel,
biography, history, true accounts of crime, adventure, or
sports. Robert Burgin's Nonfiction Readers' Advisory
[61]
is
an edited collection of articles that argue that the concepts
of genre and appeal factors used for fiction can also be used
effectively to serve nonfiction reading interests.
Appeal factor is a concept introduced by Saricks and
Brown in the first edition and elaborated in Saricks's third
edition of Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Li-
brary. Thinking about a book's appeal factors takes us
beyond subject headings or a bare plot summary. It is a
way of helping readers' advisors identify textual elements
in a book that satisfy a reader's desire for a particular
reading experience. On the basis of many years of front-
line work with public library users, Saricks
[62]
reported,
"We have found that most [leisure] readers are not look-
ing for a book on a certain subject. They want a book with
a particular 'feel.' ... Appeal elements describe more
accurately [than subject headings alone] the 'feel' of a
book." Readers provide clues about the appeal factors
they prefer when they talk about a book read recently
and enjoyed. Does the reader use terms like "compelling"
and "fast-paced" or does the reader praise the book's
leisurely unfolding? Is the reader looking for something
that is heartwarming and comforting or challenging and
edgy? Following deep listening to what readers say they
look for in a good book, readers' advisors try to match a
reader's interests with a book's appeal factors, namely
pacing, characterization, storyline, and frame (i.e., the
book's particular atmosphere or tone).
IN CONCLUSION
As fine-grained case studies of individual readers accu-
mulate, they have confirmed Ruth Strang's 1942 finding
that reading interests and preferences, in all their individ-
uality, emerge from a central core or radix that deter-
mines any individual's pattern of reading. Correlations
of demographic factors to reading choices—e.g., men
read nonfiction; women read novels; men prefer science
fiction and action adventure; women prefer fantasy and
romance—these generalizations can be useful in predict-
ing trends in sales and borrowing but don't help much in
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understanding any particular reader, whose reading pre-
ferences are as individual as a fingerprint. For some
librarians and readers' advisors, the next step in under-
standing readers is writing a reader profile, starting with
themselves. As Joyce Saricks notes about the process of
reflecting on our own reading interests, "When we see the
variety of books we enjoy, we begin to understand that
other readers feel the same way."
[63]
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... 183 or delighted" (Currie 1990, p.1), respectively. Students in this study overwhelmingly chose to be "delighted" rather than instructed, which is consistent with a general dominance of fiction in leisure reading choices (Ross, 2010;Summers, 2013). When reading fiction, "readers feel more at home, textually speaking" (Ryan, 1997, p.171) because fictional worlds are self-contained and complete so the reader does not need to check and verify facts with the real world, as he would if reading nonfiction. ...
... The study also supports claims that females read more than men (ACNielsen Company et al., 2001;Thelwall, 2017), particularly romance. However, claims that women read more fiction than men (Tepper, 2000;Ross, 2010) or that men read more nonfiction than women (NEA report 58, 2015) were only marginally supported by this study. ...
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![Celine Kamhieh]()
It is widely believed that today's university students are so enamoured of social media and other online attractions that book reading is no longer included in their leisure-time activities, particularly in the Arab world where smartphone penetration is high and interest in reading is perceived to be low. As teachers, we have an obligation to ensure our students are reading books of their own choosing. This study investigates the book-reading choices of a convenience sample of 100 male and female students attending a private university in Jordan to determine 1) what those choices are, 2) what patterns we can detect among their choices and 3) what language and format they prefer to read in. Results show that students look West for most of their book choices, at the expense of their own literature and authors, that their gendered choices reflect many of the patterns already established in the literature, that they prefer to read printed rather than digital books and that third-person narrator voice is most commonly used in the novels they read. The study also suggests that book choice may have less to do with book-based appeal factors (such as, author, protagonist, etc.,) and more to do with the overall reading experience, and that the narrator voice used in the novels students read can contribute to the richness and overall value of that reading experience.
... Anderson and other (as cited in Sarkhel & Das, 2010) defined "reading is a process, a mode of thinking, a kind of real experience, and involves many complex skills: the ability to perceive printed words, to skim for information and then perhaps read intensively." Whereas, reading interests refers variously to an individual's interest in doing reading itself, as measured by the amount of reading actually done; what a reader wants to read "about" as expressed by a list of topics or subject areas or genres that the reader reads by preference; or the elements within a text, sometime referred to as "appeal factor," that engage a particular reader with text (Ross, 2009). The classification of reading text that can be of interest to the students include books, newspapers, magazines, journals articles and other electronic resources for academic, recreation, general knowledge, current information, personality development and employment purpose etc. (Khairuddin,2013,Kapur, n.d.). ...
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![Deepti Khatri]()
- Paramjeet K. Walia
This study investigated the reading interests of undergraduate students of select colleges affiliated to University of Delhi by studying the various aspects of reading interests and habits such as reading likeness, preference for various categories of information, purpose of reading, preference for fiction and non-fiction books and time spent on various activities per day.The structured questionnaires were distributed to get the responses from male and female respondents of different disciplines. The collected data was analysed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science, Version-25) applying different statistical tests i.e. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Brown-Forsythe and Welch test and Weighted Mean. The study revealed that majority of 89.9 percent undergraduate students like reading and 68.2 percent respondents were at the age group of 19-20 years from sciences, social sciences and humanities discipline. Female respondents were more inclined towards reading in compare to the male counterparts. Both male and female respondents prefer reading books followed by newspapers and magazines. The maximum number of male and female respondents was found strongly inclined reading information sources for academic purpose followed by general knowledge. Fiction genre read by females include short stories, mystery and adventure. Whereas, male respondents read science fiction and historical fiction. Non-fiction includes self-help books and essays were frequently read by females whereas, the majority of the males read the biographies. It also depicted that female respondents preferred reading more of print resources. Whereas, male respondents read print and online resources equally.
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![Margaret K. Merga]()
Libraries provide readers' advisory services to young people to foster reading for pleasure. The Booktok community on TikTok is a resource that can be drawn upon to support promotion of books with this demographic. A hybrid content analysis of 116 TikTok videos explores presence of hashtags, authors and books, and recurring themes promoted in Booktok videos. Popular hashtags build community and promoted authors and books are a small and select group. Young people use Booktok to provide recommendations, explore reader experience and emotional response, generate reader community and identity, discuss fictional characters and places, develop and promote writing, and discuss personal library management and being a reader in the family. Libraries' reader advisory services for young people can use these findings to employ language of the discourse community for insider signposting of the library's physical space and give greater primacy to the emotional response evoked by books and reading.
- J.A. Radway
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations. © 1984, 1991 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
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![Michael W. Smith]()
- Jeffrey D. Wilhelm
The problems of boys in schools, especially in reading and writing, have been the focus of statistical data, but rarely does research point out how literacy educators can combat those problems. Michael Smith and Jeff Wilhelm worked with a very diverse group of young men to understand how they use literacy and what conditions promote it. In this book they share what they have learned. The authors' data-driven findings explain why boys reject much of school literacy and how progressive curricula and instruction might help boys engage with literacy and all learning in more productive ways.
- Michael Schudson
- Janice A. Radway
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird . Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. |For anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. Radway offers both an engaging look at the Book-of the-Month Club's role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books.
- Lawrence C. Stedman
- Carl F. Kaestle
The authors review literacy and reading achievement trends over the past century and place current debates in a historical perspective. Although then-and-now studies are methodologically weak, they suggest that students' reading performance at a given age remained stable until the 1970s. The test score decline that then occurred was not as great as many educators think, and much of it can be explained by the changing demographics of test-takers. The decline pales when compared to the tremendous increase in the population's educational attainment over the past 40 years. However, the strategy of ever-increasing schooling to meet ever-increasing literacy demands may have run its course. High school dropout rates are increasing, and educational attainment has leveled off. Researchers have identified substantial mismatches between workers' skills and job demands, and between job and school literacy skills. In spite of their flaws, functional literacy tests suggest that 20 percent of the adult population, or 30 million people, have serious difficulties with common reading tasks. Upgrading literacy skills now requires new initiatives by coalitions of educators, community groups, employers, and government agencies. /// [French] Les auteurs couvrent les tendances observées en alphabétisation et pour les performances en lecture pour le siècle dernier et situent les débats actuels dans une perspective historique. Bien que les recherches d'hier et d'aujourd'hui soient plutôt faibles du point de vue méthodologique, elles suggèrent que la performance en lecture est demeurée constante jusque dans les années '70. La baisse des résultats aux tests qu'on a alors observée n'était pas aussi importante que l'ont cru plusieurs enseignants et on peut l'attribuer pour une grande part aux changements démographiques chez ceux à qui était administré le test. Cette baisse perd de son importance si on la compare à la hausse exceptionnelle du niveau de réussite scolaire de la population au cours des quarante dernières années. Toutefois, la stratégie de scolarisation sans cesse croissante pour rencontrer la demande sans cesse croissante d'alphabétisation a pu suivre son cours. Les taux d'abandon au secondaire augmentent et le taux de réussite scolaire s'est stabilisé. Les chercheurs ont identifié de très mauvaises associations entre les qualifications des travailleurs et les exigences de l'emploi, de même qu'entre l'emploi et les habiletés de lecture et d'écriture enseignées dans les écoles. Malgré leurs imperfections, les tests fonctionnels de lecture et d'écriture suggèrent que 20 pour cent de la population adulte, soit trente millions de personnes, éprouvent de sérieuses difficultés avec des simples exercices de lecture. La revalorisation des capacités de lecture et d'écriture exige dorénavant de nouvelles initiatives par les coalitions entre enseignants, groupes sociaux, employeurs et agences gouvernementales. /// [Spanish] Los autores revisaron los logros en alfabetismo y lectura en el último siglo y sitúan a los debates actuales en una perspectiva histórica. A pesar de que los estudios de ayer comparado con hoy día son metodológicamente débiles, sugieren que el desempeño de lectura permaneció estable hasta los 1970s. La baja de los resultados en las pruebas que entonces ocurrió no fue tan grave como muchos educadores pensaron, y mucho de esto puede ser explicado por el cambio en la demografía de los sujetos que tomaron estas pruebas. Este declive palidece cuando se compara con el tremendo aumento en el alcance educativo de la población en los últimos cuarenta años. De cualquier manera, la estrategia de una carrera constante por aumentar la escolaridad para cubrir la siempre creciente demanda de alfabetismo puede haber finalizado. Los niveles de estudiantes que abandonan la escuela media han ido en aumento, y el logro educativo ha llegado a su nivel de estabilidad. Los investigadores han identificado desbalances substanciales entre los trabajos y las habilidades adquiridas en la escuela. A pesar de sus fallas, las pruebas de alfabetismo funcional sugieren que el 20 por ciento de la poblacion adulta, o 30 millones de personas, tienen serias dificultades con tareas comunes de lectura. Mejorar las habilidades para alfabetizar requiere ahora nuevas iniciativas de parte de coaliciones de educadores, grupos comunitarios, patrones y agencias gubernamentales. /// [German] Die autoren blicken zurück auf Buchwissen- und Leseleistungs-Richtungen während des verflossenen Jahrhunderts und setzen aktuelle Diskussionen in eine historische Perspektive. Obwohl Heute-und-damals-Studien methodologisch schwach sind, zeigen sie auf, daß die Lesefähigkeit beständig verblieb bis in die 1970iger Jahre. Die Prüfungsergebnis-Verschlechterung, die sich zu diesem Zeitpunkt einstellte, war jedoch nicht so arg, wie manche Erzieher annahmen, und zumindest zum Teil ist sie durch die wechselnde Bevölkerungsstatistik der Prüfer zu erklären. Die Verschlechterung tritt zurück, wenn man sie im Verhältnis sieht zu dem gewaltigen Fortschritt im Bildungsstand der Bevölkerung im Laufe der letzten vierzig Jahre. Nichtsdestoweniger ist wohl die Maß nahme, stets wachsendes Buchwissen-Bedürfnis mit stets wachsender Schulbildung zu begegnen, in etwa überholt. Immer mehr Mittelschüler verlassen vorzeitig die Schule, und die erzieherische Leistung ist nicht mehr zu steigern. Nachforschungen haben festgelegt, daß zwischen Arbeitskönnen und Arbeitsnachfrage, ebenso wie zwischen Arbeit und Schulwissen, ein ungleiches Verhältnis besteht. Amtliche Tests haben, obwohl sie fehlerhaft sind, festgelegt, daß 20 Prozent der Erwachsenen-Bevölkerung, also 30 Millionen Menschen, große Schwierigkeiten haben mit ganz gewöhnlichen Lese-Aufgaben. Um Buchwissen in unserer Zeit zu fördern, werden neue Initiativen gesucht, z.B. durch Zusammenschliessen von Erziehern, Gemeinschaftsgruppen, Angestellten und behördlichen Aemtern.
Reading And Writing About Literature 3rd Edition Pdf
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258764077_Reading_Interests
Posted by: lindseysamot1957.blogspot.com
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