Involvement While Reading: An Empirical Exploration

Abstract

Emotional and imaginative involvement while reading are often associated with immature reading processes. To explore the validity of this viewpoint we investigated over a thousand reader responses among pupils aged nine to fifteen and among adults who, due to their professional occupation, regularly read themselves. In preliminary inquiries we first investigated main categories of reading involvement such as absorption while reading, imaginative involvement and emotional involvement. In a second phase of our research we looked for subdivisions of these main categories, resulting in descriptions of many different phenomena within the categories as mentioned above. These descriptions enabled us to construct questionnaires on the many aspects of reading involvement for the main part of our project. Our preliminary results indicate that there are differences in several areas of reading involvement between children and adult readers. The general trend of those differences is that the probability of personal experience of reader-responses in the areas of imagination and emotion is greater among adult readers than among pupils. In this article we consider the implications of this general trend, using results from the area of emotional reading involvement as an example. Questionnaires on emotional involvement were completed by 198 pupils, 106 teachers and 135 librarians.