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.