Editorial: What is the future of young people’s volitional reading? Exploring diverse perspectives

Abstract

In this editorial to the special issue on the future of volitional reading, the editors explain the significance of volitional reading, both in school and out-of-school settings, for children and adolescents’ reading proficiency, student engagement and learning, and wellbeing. They offer an overview of the seven articles in the collection, highlighting the key themes of content, choice and community involvement when it comes to encouraging engaged reading. New ways of researching reading are also shared. As a collection, the special issue highlights the range and complexity of young people’s reading practices and encourages scholars, policymakers and educators to consider new ways of framing research and practice.

Keywords:

• Volitional reading
• children and adolescents
• contemporary reading practices

In a global age of increasing literacy expectations across multimodal forms of communication, the demand for reading as a basic literacy is a given. Empirical research has demonstrated the importance of children and adolescents’ choice-led reading for enhanced reading proficiency, self-directed learning and mental wellbeing (e.g. Torppa et al. 2020; Sun et al. 2024). Such volitional reading, whether for pleasure or learning, is key to student engagement and learning. Decline in young people’s reading enjoyment as reported on international tests such as PIRLS (Mullis et al. 2023) and PISA (OECD 2021) and global inequities in the form of access to reading resources exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, alongside improvements in technology enabling easier access to a wide range of reading materials (through different platforms and formats), are some of the reasons for the need for greater understanding about the complexity of young people’s contemporary reading practices.

This special issue thus aims to bring together current and cutting-edge research on young people’s (aged 8-to 18-years-old) volitional reading, both in school and out-of-school settings. The nature of volitional reading encompasses, in our view and across studies, a common focus on young people’s free choice reading, whether for the purpose of pleasure or learning, or both. Where young people see purpose in their reading and find reading enjoyable, they are more likely to engage in frequent and extended reading. Childhood and adolescence are optimal periods for the acquisition of new skills and competencies, which is why we focus on this life-stage as vital for the cultivation of volitional reading dispositions. With contributions from the USA, England, Scotland, Czechia, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, this issue offers snapshots and insights into young people’s volitional reading in different parts of the world, exploring the following questions: What counts for volitional reading and how does it count? What kinds of new angles and methods are required for examining and understanding volitional reading? How can research insights be made relevant and applicable to policy and practice? Correspondingly, how can research be informed by policy, practice and the perspectives of participants?

The special issue begins with a comparative look at the research and policy landscape of reading for pleasure in England and Australia, highlighting the benefits, tensions and recommendations in these specific country contexts. In much of the conversation on volitional reading, the role of pleasure has been recognised as a motivating factor for reading engagement, that is, young people’s self-directed and positive attitudes towards reading (e.g. Cremin et al. 2014; Wilhelm 2016). Cremin and Scholes (2024) offer a compelling case for focusing on pleasure, highlighting the cognitive, social and emotional benefits arising from young people’s frequent recreational reading. In line with their call for attention to the conceptual and methodological framing of studies of volitional reading, and to the localised application of research findings, they provide situated overviews of research, policy and practice initiatives on reading for pleasure in England and Australia. They propose a model of knowledge mobilisation where researchers, policymakers and educators could work together more intentionally to develop the evidence base on reading for pleasure in order to empower ‘staff and local communities to overcome contextually laden barriers and develop effective pedagogies’.

The theme of empowerment continues in McGeown et al. (2024) article, in particular through students engaging as co-participant reading researchers. Participatory approaches recognise that it is vital to foreground the voices and interests of the researched and grant agency to young people as collaborators. The shift towards such approaches is evident in a number of the empirical research reported in this special issue. Kuzmičová and Supa (2024) make use of a child-centred participatory approach; the young people were encouraged to make use of creative tools such as picture cards, page layout cutouts and children’s nonfiction books to share their nonfiction reading practices. Additionally, using a mobile ethnography app, Loh (2024) invited adolescents to document their print and digital reading over four days on their mobile phones.

Content and choice matters

A core theme that emerged from the articles is that content and choice matters when it comes to supporting volitional reading. This affirms earlier research (e.g. Hall and Coles 1997; Hopper 2005; Merga and Roni 2017). What is new here is an elaboration of what counts as quality content for children and adolescents. Much existing research has demonstrated the role of fiction reading in supporting volitional reading (Jerrim and Moss 2019; Martin-Chang et al. 2020), and school library circulation rates often demonstrate fiction’s popularity (Loh et al. 2022). While this ‘fiction effect’ (Jerrim and Moss 2019) is real, Kuzmičová and Supa (2024) draw our attention to how nonfiction also enables children to find pleasure in reading. Through two contrastive case studies, they offer alternative characterisations of engagement: while one child used non-fiction for ‘purposeful learning’, the other ‘pursues moments of wonder’. Young people read for varied reasons and recognising the multiplicity of motives can help educators shape opportunities for reading engagement through the provision of different kinds of texts.

Moving from children to adolescents, Loh (2024) examines adolescents’ print and digital reading habits to find out what motivates what Cremin has termed the ‘will’ to read (Cremin 2011, p. 4). The study revealed that adolescents choose to read across a wide range of texts, from traditional print novels to e-books and fanfiction and manga and that they read when there is the potential of immersive entertainment. This is described as ‘where the texts, whether accessed in print or digitally, had the potential to draw them into an all-encompassing experience of pleasure, so much so that there would be a desire to continue or complete the reading, and to engage in multiple re-readings/viewings to deepen their experience’ (Loh 2024). Like Kuzmičová and Supa (2024), Loh points to the multifaceted nature of pleasure, where engagement can be playful, social or intellectual. The findings also show how the ease of finding good stories online is facilitated by the platform (e.g. Wattpad) infrastructure, highlighting a core aspect of access as a form of social justice (Mackey 2022) - ensuring books are available to students includes making them easy to find.

The importance of fiction lies beyond instrumental aims of contributing to reading proficiency and academic achievement, an issue addressed by Ivey and Johnston (2024). Studying the experiences of adolescents reading fiction and narrative non-fiction during the school year, they found that continued engagement with self-chosen books create opportunities for transformation individually and collectively. Narratives they argue, can have ‘therapeutic value’ and are transformative in that they allow individuals to negotiate their sense of personhood through their interaction with the text and with their friends and classmates. Significantly, they point out that while books that relate to the students’ lives were important to the young people, ‘disturbing texts’ that result in ‘doubt and confusion’ allow students to learn about themselves, connect with others who bring different perspectives, and deepen their understanding of the world around them. As such, extending young people’s reading repertoires by offering options to engage with difficult texts should be part of the resource collection and pedagogical intent of teachers and librarians.

Community matters

Access to content is one aspect of providing for young people’s volitional reading. A second theme that emerged from the articles was the role of the community in supporting volitional reading. In Ivey and Johnston (2024) article, they show how the students made sense of their world and the text through reading and discussing these with teachers and friends. This was possible because time and an inclusive atmosphere was created for honest conversations. Drawing on their descriptive statistical analyses of over 6000 responses from children from the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) longitudinal cohort study and focusing on two core variables of reading frequency and enjoyment, Boyask et al. (2024) demonstrate that the home and whanau (or community) variables at age 8 were more closely associated with reading frequency than enjoyment. More significantly, they show that children who enjoy reading are more likely to have had parents reading to them when they were younger. Interestingly, the data reveal that 8-year-olds who are more involved in interest-based, secular and organised community activities and groups, have higher odds of more frequent reading. In contrast to these interest-based activities, other more structured activities such as academic lessons or religious services did not show this same association. Furthermore, associations are seen between reading enjoyment and involvement in arts-related activities, individual sports and visiting the library. While the survey format does not allow for in-depth exploration of how these different facets of a child’s life intersect, Boyask et al. suggests that engagement in activities with others in the community may have the potential to draw young people into reading rather than distract them from such endeavours. The study suggests there is a need to attend to ‘people and things’ that help to sustain volitional reading.

Outside of the classroom space, Asplund et al. (2024) examine how avid readers in one Swedish school find their own communities in the online spaces of BookTok, where vloggers record content that illustrates their reader identities and responses to books. Tracing the experiences of these readers, it became clear that their engagement with BookTok was not limited to the global online space, but flowed into their local friendships and communities, where talking about books was central to their identities. BookTok also served as a learning community where the young people picked up recommended titles as well as reading practices, such as annotations. These young people were united in their love for reading, for the physical book and for their involvement with online book communities. Volitional reading is thus ‘characterised by the social, physical and emotional dimensions, for which the book as a physical artefact is crucial’. Adapting the language of Boyask et al. (2024), both things and relations matter for these young people’s engaged reading. Like Boyask et al., Asplund et al. wonder if reading in schools could resemble more of these out-of-school interest-driven reading experiences as a way to create an environment to encourage reading enjoyment.

Conclusion and implications: the future of volitional reading

The articles in this special issue point to the diversity and range of children and adolescents reading, highlighting that young people do read when there are texts, people and things that support their agentic recreational reading. The role of volitional reading is even more crucial in an age of generative artificial intelligence and global flows of information, as young people need to learn how to become independent and self-directed learners, knowing where and how to look for information to support their life-long learning. When the young read of their own free will, they create opportunities to learn about other worlds through their engagement with texts, in print and digitally. An issue that is hinted at rather than explicitly dealt with in the articles is that of access to texts and time for reading as a form of social justice for young people who may not necessarily come from print-rich contexts. Growing up in print-rich homes, often with university educated parents (see Boyask et al. 2024), means more opportunities for exposure to print at home and therefore, for developing a positive reader identity. How to ensure equitable access to books and technologies for reading, particularly in school and community contexts, is an issue that future studies need to address. Importantly, we also need to remember that volitional reading comprises affective, social, behavioural and cognitive engagement (Lee et al. 2021), and study these interrelated factors in tandem.

New research methods have surfaced in many of the articles in this special issue, with participatory approaches and methods foregrounding the voices of young people taking centre stage. We see such methods as becoming even more important for future research. Juxtaposed against large-scale studies, they are more likely to yield the depth and detail that can offer insights to illuminate trends obtained from the broader surveys. Longitudinal studies, online textual mining of social media data, innovative place-based research are some of the possibilities for extending the research on volitional reading. Finally, research can only be made relevant when it is seen as applicable to policy and practice. In this regard, researchers should continue to focus on building the evidence base on the benefits, challenges and tensions of volitional reading. Moreover, the stakeholders themselves (school leaders, teachers, librarians, policymakers) should be supported to evaluate and consider how they themselves can most effectively nurture young people’s reading for pleasure. It is our hope that this special issue contributes to considerations of this kind and to new conversations about the nature and future of volitional reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).