Content area
Full Text
The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading.
Over the last 30-plus years, we've both had numerous conversations and sometimes even debates with parents, administrators, and other teachers about the value of the books that students most want to read and that they read with the greatest joy and engagement. We confess that we've worried about some of the reading selections our students-as well as our own daughters-have made. We confess that we've been reluctant to embrace pleasure as a goal of instruction, and of pleasure reading as an end in itself.
But we also have to confess our amazement at the profound joy and zeal displayed by many of the readers of texts so often marginalized and worryinducing: romances, vampire stories, horror novels, dystopian fiction, and fantasy. We've both seen many students who would spend hours upon hours reading outside school even as they often rejected the reading they were asked to do inside school. We wondered what these students were getting from their out-of-school reading of books that we would never deign to assign. So we decided to ask. Our research (Wilhelm and Smith) focused on the nature and variety of the pleasure adolescent readers experienced as they read those marginalized genres.
What we found, in a nutshell, was that these genres brought their readers four distinct kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of play, intellectual pleasure, social pleasure, and the pleasure of work, both functional work and psychological inner work. Our data strongly suggest that pleasure has enormous power in fostering reading engagement and development. Yet pleasure is not foregrounded in schools in ways that would leverage and develop student reading and that would help students grow as readers and as human beings.
Sophisticated recent research clearly establishes that potential for growth. Social Inequalities in Cognitive Scores at Age 16: The Role of Reading (Sullivan and Brown) draws on data collected in the 1970 British Cohort Study, which follows the lives of more than 17,000 people born in England, Scotland, and Wales in a single week of 1970. After doing a series of analyses, Sullivan and...