International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

50

Teenagers Reading: Developmental Stages of

Reading Literature

Jack Thomson

Why did I succeed at High School English? I could play the game. My inability

to experience any pleasure in literature was offset by articulating the

pleasures of the teacher or the critics. The game skill was to paraphrase their

gems of wisdom so that they sounded freshly discovered.

A tertiary student training to become an English teacher

In a research investigation of the stages of teenagers’ reading development and the
strategies they use to construct meaning from literary text, in secondary schools in a
rural town in eastern Australia, I found that all the students who couldn’t read and all
of those who could but chose not to, had a common history in infants’ and primary
school (Thomson 1987). They had all used phonics-based readers and had experienced
teaching methods that emphasised reading skills in isolation from meaningful contexts
and interest in story. In circumstances like these many children never discover that
‘reading is worth the trouble it takes to learn’ as Margaret Meek puts it (Meek 1983:
224). Literary competence is not acquired from reading phonics-based readers that
break the reading process down into subsets of technical skills which are seen as more
important than meaning, but from reading real stories.

The Research Project: Understanding Teenagers’ Reading

The starting points for the research that led to the construction of a developmental
model of teenagers’ processes of reading literature were four assumptions about reading
habits and the teaching of literature derived from observation and personal experience
as a reader and teacher:

1 Reading literature is not important in the lives of most people. Few read much either

at school or when they have left, and of those who do see reading as an important

activity only a minority read what school syllabuses have tried to make them value

as good literature. Mills and Boon and Virginia Andrews out-sell Joseph Conrad and

T.S.Eliot despite the fact that the former pair don’t get the large captive readership

that being prescribed on school and university reading lists ensures.

2 Under the influence of New Critical literary theory we have emphasised aesthetics

rather than enjoyment in our teaching of literature.