Children's Reading Choices

Martin Coles, Christine Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134670703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Children's Reading Choices discusses the reading habits of children aged between 10 and 14. The book reports the findings of the Children's Reading Choices project - conducted by the authors from the University of Nottingham and the largest national survey of children's reading choices since the 1970s.
The book includes reports and discussion on:
* girls' and boys' reading preferences and the differences between their reading habits
* the place of series books, teenage magazines and comics in children's reading
* the most popular authors and titles at different ages
* purchasing habits and library use.

Chapter 1
Reading at different ages

In this chapter, we establish that reading remains a very significant leisure time activity for children at 10, 12 and 14. We report findings about the amount of reading children report; the types of books which are most widely read, and the range and diversity of individuals’ reading choices. In doing this, we explain some of the systems of categorising data collected in the Children’s Reading Choices project. We go on to report information on the re-reading of books and numbers of books left unfinished. We conclude with the children’s views of reading, their views of their own abilities as readers and a report of reading behaviours on a randomly chosen weekday evening.

The Children’s Reading Choices project surveyed the reading habits of children aged 10, 12 and 14 during October 1994. There were approximately 2,500 children in each of the cohorts of 12- and 14-year-olds, and rather more (some 2,900) 10-year-olds. Generally, the youngest group were still in primary schools whereas the older groups of children were in secondary education.

Reading in the four weeks prior to the survey

Early in the questionnaire children were asked ‘Have you read a book (or books) in the last four weeks?’ In order to try to focus attention on voluntary, out-of-school reading, this was followed by the instruction ‘Don’t count books which a teacher said you must read as part of a lesson or for homework.’ Teachers administering the questionnaire were asked to mention a local or national event which would help the pupils define the four-week period in question. For many children this would have been the beginning of the new school year.

The responses to this question, set out in Table 1.1, show a clear trend towards fewer books being read as children grow older. This finding is confirmed in other ways by the survey data.

Table 1.1 Reading of any book in the previous month by age

The question which followed asked children to record the titles of the books they had read during the four weeks prior to the survey. Again, the children were reminded about recording voluntary rather than school-required reading. Up to thirteen spaces were allowed for noting down titles. Of the 7,976 respondents, three cited thirteen books, filling all the spaces. The average number of books cited for the month, across all age groups, was 2.52.

These bald figures are, of course, potentially misleading. Children who have not read books might well have been reading other kinds of texts, including newspapers and magazines. The average number of books read carries with it no indication of the length or complexity of the books in question. Nevertheless, the comparison with (equally bald) figures in Whitehead’s study is interesting (Whitehead et al., 1977). The average number of books read by children in the four weeks prior to his 1971 survey was 2.39. The comparative figures are shown in Table 1.2.

The significant differences between the findings for the different cohorts relate to 10 year olds of both sexes and 12-year-old girls, where the amount of reading seems to have increased over the two decades between the surveys. There is also a significant decline in numbers of books read by 14-year-old boys. Other differences are not statistically significant.¹

These findings can be interpreted as generally encouraging. Popular fears that the increase in other distractions for children in the 1990s has led to an overall decline in the amount of book reading might seem, on these figures, to be unfounded. Certainly, when the main findings from The Children’s Reading Choices project were first disseminated, the press in England used these figures to announce a ‘good news’ story, under headlines such as ‘Written Word keeps Appeal’ ( Doncaster Evening Post, 13.3.96) and ‘TV Fails to Break Reading Habit’ (Daily Telegraph, 11.3.96). Such stories, of course, become newsworthy only in the context of widespread belief that amounts and standards of reading are in decline.

Table 1.2 Average number of books read in one month, 1971 and 1994

Partial source: Whitehead et al., 1977, p. 51

The trend towards reading fewer books with age is noteworthy but not new. Whitehead et al. remarked in 1977: ‘What is certainly worrying is the marked swing away from book reading as children grow older’ (p. 272). It is also worth noting from the 1994 findings that, for boys, a statistically significant increase in reading between the two surveys at 10 years old becomes neutral at 12, and a significant decrease at 14. For girls a statistically significant increase at the ages of 10 and 12 becomes neutral at 14. One way of interpreting these figures would be to suggest that primary schools in England are more successful in promoting reading than they were in the 1970s. It might also be that in reading fewer books as they grow older, children are adopting more ‘adult’ patterns of reading, insofar as most adults probably read fewer than 2.52 books per month.

Range and diversity in children’s reading

As might be expected, the range and diversity of books children read increase as they grow older. Again, this might be seen as reflecting increasingly adult reading patterns. This trend, and the complicating factor of girls’ preferences for reading series titles such as Point Horror or Sweet Valley High are discussed more fully in chapters which follow. The diversity and eclecticism of children’s reading habits struck us immediately as we read through the questionnaires; Whitehead too discusses ‘the extraordinary diversity of book reading undertaken by these children’ (p. 279).

We decided, on receiving the questionnaires, that we would begin our analysis by creating one very long book list, detailing every title and author that each child had mentioned. We would then be able to count multiple mentions of particular titles, and perhaps track down some of the more oddly ascribed authors and decode some of the more bizarre spellings of book titles. The final book list was daunting in size – 19,344 items long – but we were able to sort it alphabetically, count multiple mentions and re-ascribe authors where children had remembered wrongly. We then set about categorising the book list into units that seemed to reflect children’s own patterns of choice.

We wanted to use the book list to consider the types of subjects that interested the children. It seemed to us that subject matter is central to the choice of book a child makes, and this judgement was confirmed by the interview phase of the work.
The books on the list often fell into broad genre-related headings, for example, horror/ghost, science fiction/ fantasy. We considered how best to approach the categorisation of fiction and non-fiction texts. We could see from our initial consideration of the whole book list that children who were, for example, interested in horses would be likely to read both fiction and non-fiction that were clearly horse related. In the end, we decided that since we were interested in subject matter that attracted different children into reading, we would group non-fiction and fiction, ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture together under category headings that reflected the subject matter of the texts. We therefore grouped the books that the children reported reading under fourteen different category headings.

We worked from the book list to try to create coherent categories that would be inclusive. We grouped horror and ghost stories together; similarly, science fiction and fantasy, crime and detective, and war and spy stories. We created separate categories for school-related books, sports-related books and animal-related books.
We gave poetry books a separate category because we were interested in identifying which children were reading poetry. We grouped joke books, annuals, comic books and humour (often TV related) under the heading of comedy. A clearly important area of young people’s reading relates to stories and information about growing up, and we decided on a single category to include romances, stories of relationships and teenage development (for example, Judy Blume’s novels) and manuals about sex education or advice to teenagers. We created one category called ‘Adventure’, which included a great number of children’s books (notably, the work of Enid Blyton and much by Roald Dahl) but which we extended to include works in which we judged that action was a prime feature. ‘Adventure’ therefore includes picaresque and quest novels and accounts of real life adventures and explorations. We needed some ‘dump’ categories and created three to attempt to draw out some distinctions. These were ‘Other Non-Fiction’ for those non-fiction texts which did not fit the subject categories, ‘Other Fiction intended for Children/Teenagers’ and an ‘Unclassifiable’ category. The coders’ working definitions of the categories are included in the appendix to this book.

It will be immediately apparent that the allocation of books to these categories could not be a completely exact science. We operated according to the rule that subject matter took precedence over the text form, except in the case of poetry. So an adventure story about animals or school was placed in the animal-related or school category. To keep the practice as consistent as possible only three of the project team members coded the entire book list. All three of us have been English teachers in school; we teach in the area of children’s literature and we are representative of both primary and secondary phases of education. We spent many hours coding the list together, to iron out as many difficulties as possible. As a check on the reliability of the coding, initially we each coded the same 3,000 items and corrected any discrepancies in the small number of cases where they occurred. We made extensive use of Nottingham University library’s copy of the ‘Global Books in Print’ CD ROM to track down individual titles and series. W. H. Smith PLC gave us practical support in this work. Local children’s librarians were extremely patient with us and generous in their willingness to share their expertise. A further check arose from the reordering of the whole book list once the codes had been entered on the computer.

The decision to categorise the book list in this way led, of course, to very broad selections of books within each category. The ‘Animal Related’ category, for example, contains Black Beauty, the Saddle Club series, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, books on how to care for pets and diagnose their ailments, and The Animals of Farthing Wood.

What, then, do these categories demonstrate about children’s reading at different ages? Tastes change as children get older, but some book types are read fairly consistently across the three ages covered by the survey. A similar percentage of children in each age group read horror/ghost and war/spy-related books. More 10-year-old pupils read science fiction/ fantasy than other year groups, but the pattern is fairly even. Readers of crime and detective works are spread fairly evenly across the ages, with a slight dip in the 12-year-old range.

Adventure is overwhelmingly the most popular category for 10-year-old readers. An interest in books about animals is also very strong in 10-year-olds; this declines considerably as the children grow older. Since this category contains books with animals as main characters, the heavy weighting towards the younger age group is perhaps unsurprising. Horror and ghost, romance and relationships, science fiction and then comedy follow in order as preferences. More than 5 per cent of 10-year-olds choose to read poetry.

More 10-year-olds than 12- or 14-year-olds read school- and sports-related books. As children grow older their taste for reading these books diminishes; this is perhaps accounted for in part by the fact that most Year 6 pupils in England are in their final year of primary school awaiting transition to secondary school. School stories perhaps have a particular interest at this point, and sports are often also an important element, especially for boys, in the transition process and the establishing of new friends and particular identities.

Twelve-year-old children retain some of the younger children’s appetite for adventure books, but are reading horror/ghost, romance/relationships and science fiction books in proportions that are similar to the older age group. The reading of books in the ‘comedy’ category also declines steadily with age. Annuals, joke and comic books, included in this category, tend to be targeted at the younger age groups which would in part account for this decline. The poetry reading figures relating to age show an enthusiasm for reading poetry in 10-year-olds which has declined sharply by 12 and has all but disappeared by 14. Readers at 14 have a fairly evenly balanced diet of adventure, horror/ghost and books on romance and relationships. There is a readership for science fiction and fantasy, but then a much smaller percentage of children at this age who read crime and detective and animal-related books. Tables 1.3 and 1.4 set out this information.

Table 1.3 Reading of book types within each age group

Table 1.4 Reading of book types across age groups

Types of reader

In order to investigate further the diversity of individual children’s reading habits, we decided to categorise the readers themselves into broad types. Whitehead in the original 1971 survey had attempted such a classification, into five categories: non-book reader, reader of narrative only, reader of non-narrative only, reader of both, and an unclassifiable category. His team found that narrative accounted for the overwhelming majority of children’s reading at all three ages (‘at least 77 % of the reading of the sample’ p. 114), and that the proportions remained steady from 10 through to 12 and 14. Where ‘non-narrative’ was being read it was predominantly by boys, in a pattern which was also consistent across the ages.

We considered using the same system of classification, but an aspect of the eclecticism of individual children’s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Reading at different ages
• Chapter 2: Favourite books
• Chapter 3: Periodical reading
• Chapter 4: Boys’ and girls’ reading
• Chapter 5: The influence of family background
• Chapter 6: Children’s reading habits
• Chapter 7: Television viewing, computer use and reading
• Chapter 8: Changes in children’s reading habits over time
• Appendix 1: The questionnaire
• Appendix 2: Project procedures
• Appendix 3: Categories and coding
• Appendix 4: The interview schedule