Reading Practices of Secondary Schools Teenagers

A dispassionate approach concerning the reading practices of secondary school teenagers is the main goal of this study, regarding a particular school library. It’s based on three methodologies of observation: by collecting evidence of pupils’ presence in a school library; by holding an inquiry about their reading and leisure practices and by questioning some young people’s personal statements which escape a sociological and group approach. Through these supports of investigation, we can delineate a new scenery of teenager’s reading practices: they read but in a different way, different from the adults’ habits. The understanding of these ways of reading establishes the role of the school library in the promotion of reading styles and allows a more realistic approach to its real effects.

“Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?”: Author Interviews as Literary Advice

This chapter examines the relationship between author interviews and literary advice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on case studies in the form of two interview series: the interwar “How Writers Work” series, published in the British periodical Everyman, and the “Art of Fiction” series, published in the American magazine The Paris Review from 1953 onward. It also discusses the explosion of author interviews in the era of online media. The chapter argues that the author interview is an expansive form, encouraging readers of all types to bring their own agendas and reading styles to the text, including but not limited to reading for advice. The very ambiguity of the relationship between author interviews and literary advice has in fact worked in the former’s favor: enabling it to gain both popularity and prestige in an era of professionalized literary studies.

Digital replica editions versus printed newspapers: Different reading styles? Different recall?

This article investigates reading styles and recall of the news from reading digital replicas of printed newspapers on tablets and compares them with the printed version. The study aims to theoretically understand the effects of the medium interface (tablet vs paper) on perceived reading style and recall of information. The experimental study ( N = 90) showed that digital replicas were not perceived to be read in a more fragmented, selective, or elaborate manner than their printed counterparts. On average, readers recalled less from the digital edition than from the printed version, but the differences were small. The study also showed that “digital innovators” recalled the same amount of information from reading the newspaper on tablet as from reading it on paper, unlike less innovative readers: these readers recalled more from reading on paper than from tablet.