Young People Reading

Abstract

The value of small-scale, finely-grained qualitative research into young people’s reading is often under-rated, compared with data generated by larger-scale surveys. However, there is a great deal to be learnt about the richness of young people’s reading in the 21st century which small-scale qualitative research projects are particularly well-placed to explore. In this fascinating volume, 11 researchers, many of them in the early stages of their careers, share their experiences of undertaking a wide variety of reading research in very different contexts across the world with young adults aged between 12 and 21. The research projects were undertaken in Canada, Catalonia, England, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey and Uganda. The research is divided into three sections: ‘Making adolescent reading choices visible’; ‘Adolescent reading in times of crisis’; and ‘Young adult readers’ experiences within and beyond school and university’. Some of the many correspondences between the different projects are drawn out in the editors’ Introduction and Conclusion. The book not only yields important insights into young people’s reading in the early 21st century in many diverse media and languages; it also offers an array of empirical methodologies and research methods by which the researchers generated their data. The research is intended to be replicable, thus providing support and inspiration to future researchers and teachers, whether undertaking their own studies within higher degrees or post-doctoral work, like the contributors here, or teaching and researching within other educational contexts. Key issues addressed in this book include: -how young people’s reading compares and contrasts across a wide range of international contexts, including the complexity of sociocultural similarities and differences -how multilingual, bilingual and monolingual readers experience their reading -how young adult readers read in a range of different media e.g. print or digital texts -how our understanding of the range of texts available to young readers and the different contexts of and purposes for reading can be deepened through small-scale qualitative research -what we can learn from small-scale, qualitative, empirical research in different parts of the world