"Teens today don't read books anymore"

Abstract

A research study on college students reading, engaging and comprehending across multiple modalities: print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Over the last several years the popular and scholarly presses have been rife with articles about how teens are not reading. The widely publicized 2004 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study, Reading at Risk is written up as: literary reading in dramatic decline. In 2007, the NEA did a follow up or Not to Read and results indicated that young adults were reading significantly less. At the same time, The Pew Internet and American Life Project's 2004 report, found only 5% of respondents reported doing the majority of their leisure reading online. Another Pew report, Writing, Technology, and Teens found even teens who report high levels of digital literacy activities do not consider the activities to be real reading or writing. Audio literacy is an important, often overlooked skill set that should always be studied in conjunction with print and digital practices. The previous research on audio literacy matches with the results of the Audio Publishers Assocation, which found that print readers are more likely to be listeners (2006) Diakidoy et al. (2005) found that the relationship between listening and reading comprehension becomes stronger after children have mastered decoding, and that listening comprehension does not exist independently from reading comprehension. Online and e-book reading is a more recent phenomenon, and although there is plenty of research that discuss the e-book readers and their technical features, few report research results. Ramirez, (2003) found that most college students (78%) preferred print, and Liu (2005) found strong preference for print (over 90%). Are teens really not reading as much as they did in the past? Are teens reading, but in nontraditional and/or unreported modalities? If the surveys focus on book reading, what about all the teens who do all their reading online or in digital modalities? What about the youth who listen to audiobooks? I think that young adults today may be reading just as much as youth in the past, but their ways and types of reading are so different from the older generations who create these polls and studies, that they are not accurately capturing the true levels of adolescent literacy leisure activities. We need to know how they read and if their comprehension, interest and engagement is the same across multiple modalities. To answer these questions, I am currently conducting an experiment comparing 3 modalities (print, e-book, or audio) and three leisure-reading texts with female college students.