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You
are here: Investigating Reading as Recreation
Introduction
We know that taking piano, tennis, karate, sewing, language, or almost any lesson does not make a student an accomplished practitioner of the skills taught. Learning skills is the bedrock of accomplishment. Practice is the polishing agent. The more one practices, the better one gets. Reading is no different. The more one reads, the better a reader she becomes. Practice, the not so secret ingredient for success, is often the most difficult ingredient to add in sufficient amounts. How do educators and parents promote practice, especially practice for those who have weak skills and little desire to work on the skills? How do we make reading enjoyable, recreational? Reading and interest level of a reader needs to be appropriate in order to promote reading. That knowledge is not enough to encourage the reluctant reader to practice.As a K-12 teacher and graduate educator, I have investigated the issue of why people read for pleasure. An obvious answer comes to mind. They read what they like. Educators and parents should therefore, provide materials that are of interest to the students. Easier said than done. And, haven't we done just that? Why aren't we more successful? Why don't our students love to read? We need to understand more than we do to help the reluctant reader.
Knowing why people choose to read, investigating the positive, may help parents and educators motivate those who do not read for pleasure. I looked at the reasons for reading reported by students who are recreational readers to better understand why they read. Recreational readers aged 3 to 60 indicated that their reasons for pleasure reading fell into three broad categories:
1. Reading to check reality.
2. Reading to escape.
3. Reading to learn specific skills or information.Examination of Findings
Examining each of the three categories for recreational reading more closely provides insight into why reading is pleasurable and what the reader gains from reading.Reading to check reality
Finding our place in the world, our relationship to the world, is an eternal quest. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few of my favorites, spent their lives trying to place man in the universe. Identity crises, mid-life crisis, the question of "who am I" are issues everyman faces not just philosophers of world renown. Teenagers, a demographic likely not to read recreationally, are particularly prone to question their place in the cosmos. No matter what age we are, the question of how the world relates to us and we to it, is somewhere in our thoughts.Reading to check reality allows the reader to understand her place in the world and the relationship of the world to her. These readers want to understand how what they do, say, think and dream fits into the society in which they live. Readers who read as a reality check want to find out how their life is the same as or different from the lives of people of the same age, religion, sex, or socioeconomic level. They want to know that they are, or are not, out of the ordinary. Or, they want to define ordinary.
The success of books like Little Women, Tom Sawyer, and The American Girl series are indications of the need for children to compare their lives with the lives of others. These books provide a view of other children growing up. They are about children living in other times. Perhaps that is one of their charms. They let the reader know that growing up hasn't changed all that much. Children always loved their mothers, always needed the kinship of their siblings, always wanted to have fun, and always got into trouble. These are themes without dates. They provide readers with a base-point for reality.
It is not only children who need and want a reference for their lives. A graduate student told me that she read about the Holocaust whenever she was depressed. Reading about people whose lives were worse than hers put her life into perspective and made her feel better. She was looking to define her world in terms of those less fortunate. This was more than schadenfreude. It was an attempt to tell herself that she was all right-- actually more than all right. She should be happy.
But, reading for reality check is not simply a "compare and contrast" issue. It is a quest for the reality that could be. The questions of "what can I be," "why am I here," "am I a good person" cannot be answered without perspective. Ethical issues as well as issues of self actualization enhance the reality arena. Was Huckleberry Finn racist? He says words that have racist connotations. Does that make him racist? How does he compare with the reader? Is Tom Sawyer dishonest? He tricks people into doing his work. Are Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn good people? In answering the questions a reader makes decisions on right, wrong and their perceptions of the world. Reading to reality check provides a perspective for readers to begin to answer questions about themselves.
Reading for a reality check readers want to read about themselves. This brings up the issue of self-identification. In the case of the graduate student previously mentioned, she identified with those of her religion. The attributes with which one identifies, defines oneself, vary. They could include issues of family, where one lives, responsibilities, ethnicity or religion, emotional or social problems, physical disability. The attribute could be experiences of parents or grandparents. Defining attributes could be all or any of the above at various times. The permutations are as endless as the search for identity.
Both fiction and non fiction can provide the reader with a better understanding of themselves and their world. Non-fiction can often provide a more concrete identification object. Newspaper and magazine articles, biographies, and autobiographies provide easily accessible objects with whom to identify. Fiction can be more subtle but more powerful. Each genre provides the kernels of truth the reality check seeker needs.
Reading to escape
No matter where, when, or how we live there are times when we want to withdraw from our world and times when we want to control it. There are in every culture, forbidden fruits we'd like to try. When reading to escape the reader tastes of the forbidden fruits, controls the world, and views new worlds. The reader does, sees, and is the impossible.Reading puts the locus of power in the hands of the reader. The reader can leave the constraints of her environment, financial, social, political, sexual, biological, ethnic, or any other, and move into a world without boundaries. This world and others is the reader's oyster.
The desire to withdraw from this world has made the names Rowling, Carroll, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Tolkein world famous. These authors have provided altered universes in which normal states of being are not the norm. They have provided venues for the impossible and channels for escape. Fantasy and science fiction are escapes routes but not the only ones.
Escaping one's world is more than changing the place or time. Views into different, but plausible, life styles, situations, settings, as well as intellectual interaction with a variety of characters also provide an escape from the reader's world. Romance novels, detective fiction, historical, novels provide the reader with alternative settings, characters they don't know, and situations they haven't met. They allow a vicarious involvement in circumstances one would shun in real life. Escape into a real but undesirable world is possible.
Of course, there escaping into a desirable but attainable world is also possible through reading. A glimpse the world of wealth, power, and beauty provided by fiction and non fiction is also a means of intellectual escape.
Forbidden fruits provide a lure for all. The can be enjoyed with impunity when they are tasted vicariously through reading. One can overpower the enemy, enjoy relationships, bask in the glow of obscene riches, and do anything they want-- when they are reading.
Reading to learn specific skills or information
Reading to learn includes learning specific skills, filling in academic gaps, or satisfying curiosity about a subject. This category also includes reading because fiction is viewed as less worthy than fact.Reading materials that help the reader understand how to do something; how to improve or change her life; how something happened or something works; how things were or weren't; how to do or make things all fall into the reading to learn category. This category is self explanatory and doesn't require a great deal of analysis for the most part.
One group of readers only reads to learn. This group has little or no respect for non-fiction. A first grader who was an excellent reader, well beyond his years in both decoding and comprehension, told me that he didn't want to read "lies", when I suggested a fictional title. He is not alone in this view of fiction. Some readers feel that fiction is "a waste of time." Fiction filters reality. Not all readers respect the filtering process or the filtering lens. These readers find reading fiction unpleasant and irrelevant. Obviously, they will not be reading fiction recreationally.
It could be said that this category includes the other two. In the broadest sense it does. Everything read has information. Everything read teaches. Therefore, everything read is read for learning. But, a closer examination of all three categories revealed differences that may help steer a reluctant reader toward materials that will engage.
Conclusion
Reading material exists on every topic, every level of reading ability and in many forms. Matching the reader with the material is a challenge for educators and parents. Looking at the reasons recreational readers have for reading, provides new ideas for encouraging the reluctant reader to read. The categories presented in this paper are not iron bound. They serve only to provide new ways of focusing the attention of the reading material provider on the needs and desires of readers. Looking at the possibilities in light of the individual reader provides another means of matching material to reader.
Bibliography
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Nancy Prince-Cohen (nprincecohen@csupomona.edu) has worked in education in New York and California. She has been a K-12 and graduate educator at Hunter College, New York City and is currently a graduate educator at California State Polytechnic University.
Nancy is the author of numerous archaeology and history articles written for children. Her work in online education has been presented at conferences in California. She is currently developing an online MAT for use in California State Universities and working on a series of videos for young children.
Nancy received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Masters from City College, City University of New York. She is a proud member of Kappa Delta Pi.
©March 2005 New Horizons for Learning
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