Committed and reluctant male teenage readers: beyond bedtime stories

In this article we describe the leisure reading practices and attitudes towards reading of two cohorts of teenage boys and their parents from one educated, middle-class school community in Australia. Leisure reading refers to free choice or recreational reading across a range of genres (e.g., fiction/nonfiction) and modes (e.g., print/electronic). First we make explicit the cultural practices in one community that contributed to differential reading formations of boys who are capable readers, and second, we highlight the boys' increasing sense of agency and their selective appropriations of their families' leisure reading dispositions. In so doing, we respond to concerns raised in the research literature regarding the challenges educators and parents face in maintaining teenage boys' engagement in reading a wide range of texts. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective, we compare the patterns of reported leisure reading of teenage boys identified as “able and committed readers” with boys identified as “able and reluctant readers.” Using a model based on Rogoffs (1995) concept of guided participation, we compare the boys' attitudes towards various forms of reading and their parents' reports of family reading practices designed to guide boys into valued forms of leisure reading. We found that despite the similar ways in which both cohorts of boys had been supported as “cultural members” (Rogoff, Goncu, & Mosier, 1993) in developing valued reading practices in the home, the committed readers “took from” (Heath, 1983) their families' reading dispositions in very different ways than did the reluctant readers. A complex portrait of individual choice around reading emerges from our data. Our analytical model of guided participation provides a valuable framework for educators to examine the social formation of other sorts of readers across a range of cultural contexts.