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What do young adults read? : a qualitative study into what texts Grade 12 students value -- past, present, and future

University of British Columbia

What do Young Adults Read? What texts do young adults read and what media do they value? This qualitative study examines the breadth of texts that seventy young adults value—past, present and future. In this investigation, reading is the act of receiving a text and interpreting it. Students named their favourite texts—movies, videos, television, print and those that they valued from childhood. The study took place in three stages—the first, collecting written survey responses from seventy students from three different Alberta high schools. Next, I conducted audiotaped interviews with twelve individuals, two boys and two girls at each site. Finally, I translated six of the interview transcripts into short representative narratives of young adult readers. This multi-case study reveals how idiosyncratic the engagement with reading is for each individual. The findings show that there is little room for predicting how other readers might value texts after identifying the texts that some value. However, the student responses reveal a level of articulate thought as to why their particular texts were valued.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-10-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/13982

Children's Literature

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace