Building a culture of reading in secondary schools is "like training for a marathon or losing 50 pounds: Every big shift is built--and sustained--by small, incremental steps." In this article, "Book Love" author Penny Kittle describes specific strategies that middle and high school educators can use to set the conditions for…

Incarcerated adolescent girls can benefit from an English classroom where personal identities, roles, and relationships can be challenged, resisted, and confronted. Education in English can be a transformative experience allowing adolescent girls to reshape and rethink not only their literacy identities but also their lives. An analysis of the…

Technology has become a catalyst influencing not only the medium, but also the variety of texts that adolescents encounter. It blurs the standard distinction between in-school and out-of-school literacies and fosters an interplay of reading for recreational and academic purposes. How students feel about reading remains an important question, to be…

Students' perceptions about the Internet's usefulness and potential to engage them in academic learning tasks have been found to influence their success in reading for information in online tasks. This article helps to understand the types of dispositions that adolescents may have toward reading on the Internet and how to characterize these…

Although adult readers may savor the chance to choose from a wide range of things to read, experiment with different genres, and discover exciting books on their own, high school students' reading choices in school are generally narrowed to a few standard classic novels, Gilmore argues. The list of recommended "good" books that most high schools…

"Reading maturity" is a construct that looks broadly at reading development encompassing not only basic reading skills but reading habits, attitudes, and dispositions. It has a rich history and this article calls for a need to make reading maturity a necessary part of the literacy curriculum. It offers a working description and reviews…

Can students read difficult but self-selected texts--and if so, how? In this article we describe what we learned about middle school students' use of background knowledge and specific vocabulary from interviews and surveys in our longitudinal study of magazine reading habits. Then we discuss the implications of these findings for structuring…

Several large-scale studies confirm that students nationwide are eschewing reading for other pursuits. Less than one third of 13-year-olds read daily; the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing for pleasure has ballooned. In a span of 20 years, American students have transformed from being among the most to the least avid readers of…

This article describes a pilot study conducted with 10 identified avid adolescent readers who completed the Adolescent Motivation to Read Profile (AMRP) (Pitcher, Albright, DeLaney, Walker, Seunarienesingh, & Moggie, 2007) that includes both a survey to determine students' self-concept and value of reading and an interview that sheds light on what…

Teaching for social responsibility should be one of the vital aims of our schools. Young adult literature offers an authentic, meaningful, and critical way to teach for social responsibility. This article offers an overview of the different elements of social responsibility and some young adult novels and graphic novels that could be used to teach…

Presents results of survey conducted to discover the reading habits and preferences of secondary school students in Greece. Results show a high percentage read a newspaper often and the number of books read per month is high. (BK)

This article reports a project undertaken in a Caribbean high school among 17 students in a low stream Year 3 class of reluctant readers (mostly boys) who had been experiencing repeated failure. The project, aimed at promoting leisure reading among the adolescents, ran for 16 weeks. During this period, reading materials--mostly those in which the…

Provides an overview of the needs of the adolescent, contemporary trends impacting the adolescent, and 16 action steps which library professionals might take to be in touch with the reluctant adolescent reader. A summary of adolescents' responses to a questionnaire concerning adolescent reading issues is included. (EJS)

Discusses results of survey of senior high school student attitudes toward reading for pleasure and suggests ways in which librarians, working with students, teachers, and parents, can integrate pleasure reading into curriculum and home; i.e., provide appealing materials, recommended bibliographies, networks for sharing information about books,…

Describes a language arts teacher's work at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children, showing how the teacher established student reading habits before developing their writing. (A novel written by one of the students is included as an example of the work done in the program.) (RL)