The Benefits of Reading for Pleasure

An enormous body of evidence shows that frequent reading for pleasure improves general literacy at all ages.

Other benefits of reading for pleasure include:

• improved academic achievement (due to strong literacy)

• improved career prospects and long term financial benefits (likely and largely due to the academic and literacy benefits)

• improved mental health (potentially due to the escapism, feeling part of a community of readers, sharing opinions on reading)

• improved memory (likely due to the cognitive demands of paying attention and holding information in mind over the time it takes to read a novel or other long text)

• improved empathy (possibly because of the frequent exposure to different ideas and experiences through reading)

• improved civic engagement (potentially due to the combination of the other benefits).

How to Create Communities of Reading

When building a community of readers, and nurturing a culture of reading in a institutional environment such as a school, the evidence strongly suggests the following factors are critical for success:

• a range of high quality, curated books to choose from, that are easily accessible and available for the students

• students are given and encouraged to use a high degree of agency in choosing what and how they read; underpinning this is the most urgent need for them to be taught the skills to find & make good choices

• reading for pleasure is strongly associated with highly social activities; talking about books, sharing recommendations and opinions, taking part in fun activities based on books, etc.

Successful projects require strong, united leadership, who role model for others in the community (e.g. teachers) and demonstrate the importance of reading for pleasure; and they require an significant investment of time. Long-lasting culture shifts cannot happen overnight, and the devotion of time demonstrates that the community genuinely values the activity.

Note: Enforced SSR (Silent Sustained Reading, or, more infamously, "Sit down, Shut up, and Read") without the support of the other factors has the opposite effect, further alienating and disengaging students who need the time the most.

Ebooks

• Early ebooks were shown to have the novelty factor, or what I like to refer to as 'tech's appeal' - this appears to be particularly relevant for boys (while 'novelty' may not still be applicable in NZ's BYOD saturated schools, it is likely that accessing books on a device may still be 'cooler' than a paperback for some students)

• Ebooks also improve accessibility for students with language barriers such as dyslexia or ESOL, with the font adjustment functions and in-built instant dictionaries

• Some ebook platforms allow commenting or other social functions (such as Wattpad, or Kindle's 'popular highlights' that show other readers' favourite parts of the text)

• Increasingly, ebook apps often have a text-to-speech function; again, very effective for students with language barriers

• Ebooks can also be extremely convenient, especially when being accessed on a smartphone or tablet, which most teenagers now have

• Ebook catalogues make it easier to search for and access specific titles or browse genres, titles, authors, or algorithmic recommendations such as "readers also bought..."

Screen vs. Paper?

The existing research suggests there is little to no comprehension difference between reading on screen and reading on paper. Any differences appear to be caused by other personal and environmental factors, for example, how long a person is comfortable reading, or that they are so used to skimming and scanning on a screen on websites and social media, they find it difficult to break the habit when switching to a long text like an ebook. (This is something that needs more research, but is beyond the scope of this study).

Listening vs. Reading?

As with ebooks, there is limited evidence around whether listening or reading is "better" for overall understanding of a text. 'Just' listening to a book admittedly won't help strengthen a student's spelling, but it will still expose them to a broader vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the meaning and ideas embedded in the story. (Conversely, a student who only ever encounters certain new words in written form may mispronounce that new vocabulary for years after.)

It is clear that strong readers who already read frequently for pleasure are more likely to prefer print books for a multitude of factors, not least the physicality of it (including touch and smell senses, for example). However, mode-switching is increasingly common and audiobook reading now has very broad acceptance among strong, devoted readers as a 'real' reading option, as it allows them to engage with books in a much wider variety of situations, including while walking, driving, or doing chores, for example.

For reluctant and resistant readers, on the other hand, audiobooks are proven to have much stronger appeal than printed text (either paper or digital). This means audiobooks have great potential as a 'gateway' reading option for such students. For other students with sight or other processing obstacles, audiobooks might be their only option.

Therefore, this study's position is that audiobooks are an essential and valuable option for teens to read.

Online book clubs and digital reading communities have demonstrated enormous power to influence people's engagement with reading, especially teenagers. They have been used with some great success to support extracurricular book clubs and school libraries in connecting with potential readers, and there is a growing body of evidence around this. The advantages and attractions include social connection through a feeling of belonging (e.g. keeping up with what everyone else is talking about and reading) and social feedback that rewards participation (e.g. likes, shares, and positive comments).

However, there are major concerns around privacy, health, and data control with these massive corporations, with (at the time of writing in 2024) ongoing legal cases in the US and EU, suing Meta (Instragram and Facebook) and TikTok for various data violations and harm to minors.

Therefore, whilst there is strong evidence of the enormous potential in using their platforms to support development of teen interest in reading, requiring teens to sign up and use them in class as part of the Learning to Love Reading programme would be inappropriate.

Potential digital educational alternatives (such as Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams), that use similar functions to these social media apps but without the same risks, have not yet been thoroughly explored. This gap, among others, has led to the development of this research.

While there is a large and growing body of evidence for effectively developing school-wide reading cultures and community-based initiatives, and there are studies into intensive specialist interventions with students outside of the classroom context, there is very little evidence in between. There is very little available to support individual teachers with a class-sized group of teenagers in a high school context where students regularly and frequently move between subjects multiple times a day. 

There is even less evidence around using educational devices and apps to support reading for pleasure, especially in the classroom environment at the secondary school level (although there is some research coming out of the UK looking at ebooks and audiobooks at the primary level, and plenty of study into academic screen-reading at university level).

Broadly speaking, these are the questions that currently do not have clear answers in the existing evidence:

• How can a high school teacher develop a reading community in their class with limited time, support, and resources?

• How can ebooks and audiobooks most effectively be used to engage reluctant teen readers in classrooms and school libraries?

• How can educational technology be best implemented to support the development of a secondary classroom reading community in a BYOD context?

These are the gaps that this study intends to help fill.

BIBLIOGRAPHY & FURTHER READING

The following is a selection of references that have been chosen for readability, and (wherever possible) for their open access. 

Please note, a few may now be behind paywalls (e.g. on news websites such as the New Zealand Herald) or the URLs may have changed since the initial literature review (submitted for confirmation at Massey University in mid-2023).

For the full list of 152 references from the confirmation report and research proposal, including academic journals, please feel free to contact the researcher. 

Baron, N. S., & Hood, N. (2022). Reading in the digital age [Webinar]. The Education Hub. https://theeducationhub.org.nz/reading-in-the-digital-age/ 

Best, E. (2020). Audiobooks and literacy: A rapid review of the literature. National Literacy Trust. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED607775.pdf 

Best, E., & Clark, C. (2021). The role of audiobooks to engage reluctant readers and underrepresented children and young people. National Literacy Trust. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED614814.pdf 

Caygill, R., Zhao, B., Hunter, H., & Park, S. (2021). How our education system is performing for literacy: Progress and achievement of New Zealand learners in English medium settings. https://assets.education.govt.nz/public/Literacy-and-Maths-strategy-development-in-2021/How-our-education-system-is-performing-for-Literacy.pdf

Clark, C., & Rumbold, K. (2006). Reading for pleasure: A research overview. N. L. Trust. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED496343.pdf 

Davidson, C., & Harris, R. (2019). Reading in a digital age. Read NZ Te Pou Muramura. https://www.read-nz.org/Images/Assets/59555/1/Read%20NZ%20Te%20Pou%20Muramura%20Reading%20in%20a%20Digital%20Age%20report%202019.pdf 

Duff, A. (2022, March 25). Alan Duff: Education think tank and the ‘child literacy crisis’. The New Zealand Herald. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/alan-duff-education-think-tank-and-the-child-literacy-crisis/CVB3EX4VVQ5BSDU44DI4OKTS4U/ 

Heid, M. (2018). Are audiobooks as good for you as reading? Here’s what experts say. Time USA, LLC. https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/ 

Henry, D. (2022, August 22). Reading block: NZ’s falling literacy crisis - why our kids can’t read. The New Zealand Herald. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/reading-block-nzs-falling-literacy-crisis-why-our-kids-cant-read/T2PTURNRSNURR26WCCAJLIFSEA/ 

Ling, S. (2021). What happens at book club. The Globe and Mail, 8. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-what-happens-at-book-club/

McNaughton, S. (2020). The literacy landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand: What we know, what needs fixing and what we should prioritise. https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/f/688/files/2020/01/The-Literacy-Landscape-in-Aotearoa-New-Zealand-At-a-glance-final.pdf

Merga, M. K. (2022b, August 1). How to encourage teens to read. The Education Hub. https://theeducationhub.org.nz/how-to-encourage-teens-to-read/

Murphy, P. J. (2021). Read alouds that rock: Book clubs to love. Publishers Weekly (Online), 4. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/88108-read-alouds-that-rock-book-clubs-to-love.html 

National Endowment for the Arts. (2008). To read or not to read: A question of national consequence: Executive summary. Arts Education Policy Review, 110(1), 9-22. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf 

Willingham, D. T. (2016). Is listening to an audio book "cheating?". Daniel Willingham - Science & Education Blog. http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog/is-listening-to-an-audio-book-cheating

Wolf, M. (2022). Ezra Klein interviews Maryanne Wolf [Interview]. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-maryanne-wolf.html