Loh, Chin Ee

Research has shown that adolescents are more likely to read when they find books that are engaging and relevant to them. Fiction remains popular among teens because it meets adolescents’ need for reading something enjoyable with relatable characters and storylines. Furthermore, fiction titles that are popular among teens provide a topic of conversation for adolescents to connect with their peers. Educators and librarians need to know what teens like to read to find engaging and motivating content for them.

Leisure reading is associated with many advantages such as improving language skills and academic achievement, developing emotional intelligence and supporting social mobility. Children’s dispositions to read are shaped by instrumental and social factors, and the home reading environment is an important factor that encourages the development of leisure reading habits. This study examines how parental cultural capital, in the form of parents’ educational qualifications,identification as readers and ability to provide their children with resources (e.g., books, comfortable reading environments, devices and subscriptions for reading) support children’s development of positive reading habits.

With increased access to technologies for reading, more understanding is needed about how adolescents engage with print and digital reading across school and out-of-school contexts. In this study, mobile ethnography was used to document the everyday print and digital reading practices of adolescent girls from one all-girls’ school. They responded to real-time researcher prompts about their reading across various timings, locations, and devices over four days, and participated in photo-elicitation interviews. Findings showed that as students moved between locations, they also transited across devices, platforms, and formats, making use of different print and digital resources for varied ways of reading. Their ability to ‘style-shift’ flexibly across the boundaries of school and personal spaces, various devices and platforms allowed them to independently optimise reading as a resource for their everyday leisure, information seeking, and learning purposes. Insights, implications, and challenges for learning in a post-pandemic digital age are discussed.

This article adopts a Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue to explore the affordances of virtual book clubs, and how they can foster dialogues and encourage dialogic thinking in students. Drawing on a qualitative case study of 11-year-old students participating in an online book club, we explore how digital book clubs open dialogic spaces for students to build on discussions of texts. Readers learn to read beyond the text by becoming more aware of the text and other readers, and also learn collaboratively by building on each other’s responses and being exposed to different perspectives and ideas. We demonstrate how online spaces such as virtual book clubs can enhance students’ reading engagement and open dialogic spaces for the different exchanges they have with others. Implications for using online book clubs for offering students opportunities to read and think critical and collaborative learning are discussed.

Given constant online access to information, critical news literacy, or the ability to access and critically evaluate the news, is essential for adolescents to learn about the world and obtain civic knowledge to participate as national and global citizens. Although there has been much research focusing on how youths critically read and produce media, less attention has been paid to the issue of access as an essential element of news literacy. Drawing on survey data (N = 5732) and focus group discussions (N = 67) with Singapore adolescents aged 13–17 years old, this study examines (1) whether adolescents access the news and if so, via what technologies, and (2) the factors that influence their news access. Findings show that adolescents prefer to read news online and that older adolescents (aged 15–17 years old) read more than younger adolescents (aged 13–14 years old). Factors shaping access to news include technological (portability, personalization, curation, and notifications), social (families, peers, and schools as sponsors), and personal factors (active seeking of news vs. incidental news exposure). Policymakers, scholars, and educators should consider the physical, social, and curatorial dimensions of news reading to implement policies and design practices to encourage news access and exposure. Educators can foster adolescents' motivation to read news by engaging them with news of interest to them, creating opportunities for them to receive the news through their smartphones and other devices, and developing their civic knowledge base.

In this article, Chin Ee Loh, Baoqi Sun, and Chan-Hoong Leong utilize a critical spatial perspective to examine how students from different socioeconomic statuses access reading resources at home, in school, and in the community. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) data, they evaluate the distribution of reading resources in Singapore by mapping out students’ physical distances to libraries and bookstores. They juxtapose the data against case studies of students and survey data from more than six thousand participants from six secondary schools in Singapore to understand their use of resources for reading. Findings show that while students may have equal access to reading resources in terms of access to public resources for books, home backgrounds significantly affect students’ actual access. The critical spatial approach of this study provides a new way to evaluate the efficacy and equity of resource distribution and access for twenty-first-century learning.

Research on the gendered reading habits and preferences of boys and girls presents them as very different. This study focuses on the gendered reading habits and preferences of Singapore adolescent students (aged 12 to 17) to examine if such polarity exists in their reading habits. Drawing on survey data from 4830 adolescents in five secondary schools, the findings show that, while more girls enjoyed reading compared to boys, both boys and girls preferred to read for pleasure. Although there are some gendered differences in reading preferences, adolescents’ preferred reading materials differ less than often portrayed, with convergence in areas such as Adventure and Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the area of reading and technology, the findings suggest that girls read more online, reflecting their tendency to read more in print. More complex understanding of contemporary adolescent reading will allow educators, librarians and parents to better address adolescent reading needs.