by guest writer Lydia Beyoud

At a time when newspapers and library associations are reporting a huge surge in teen and youth reading, while at the same time we continue to hear alarming reports that fewer and fewer children are reading, it’s important to develop strategies for parents, educators, and publishers to encourage our youth to read.
Cecelia Goodnow, a journalist with online news source Seattlepi.com, reports that with increasing sales and more-sophisticated offerings for older young adult readers, we are living in the “golden age for young adult literature.” Nevertheless, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has recorded that teenage reading continues to drop. Seeking to counterbalance the latter and promote more of the former, parents, educators, and publishers strive to find ways to get kids hooked on reading from an early age and settled into a habit that will continue through adulthood.

Katie O’Dell, School-age Services Manager for the Multnomah County Library System (Oregon), reports that there is a marked decline in children’s reading habits during summer months, which can have startling consequences for their education and learning retention. Research shows that a total drop in reading during the summer months causes children to loose three months’ worth of learning acquired during the school year. This habit has a cumulative effect, meaning that a child who doesn’t read during three summers will enter third grade more than a year behind on their schoolwork.

O’Dell also notes that low-income children (from what the library system refers to as “nonprint households,” meaning families that do not receive newspapers, magazines or maintain home libraries,) are particularly set back during the typical summer reading slump because of limited access to reading materials.

The library understands that the two fundamentals to get kids reading at an early age are a comfortable place to read and easy access to books. While children from higher income families have fewer problems accessing bookstores or procuring transportation to the library and are more likely to come from an environment where books are present in the home and reading is encouraged, low-income children are put at an immediate learning disadvantage due to the probable lack of all of the above.

For this reason, the library targets their programs and outreach to low-income children and school districts through “book talkers.” Book talkers visit the lowest performing counties in the state to promote not just specific books but the pleasures of reading in general, as well as by connecting teachers and school media specialists with the public library directly and providing training to students on how to use the catalogue system.

Research also shows that children reach the developmental stage of becoming proud to be a reader, having surmounted the period of learning to read and transitioning to reading to learn, between third and fourth grades. This nine- to ten-year-old age group is the only one to show an increase in reading compared to all other age groups. Furthermore, reading scores are generally higher during this period than at any other time. As children age and find themselves with dwindling school resources, greater independence, and the pull of other interests and pastimes, reading habits begin to slacken unless actively promoted.

Parents and librarians nationwide are attempting to develop new methods beyond the tried-and-true “read with your children” advice and summer reading programs, incorporating technology like audio books and accepting youth-geared graphic novels, blogs, and Internet reading as acceptable forms of literacy. While educators, according to O’Dell, are slower to incorporate these tactics into their students’ literacy training, all would agree that the best way to get kids to enjoy reading and turn it into a lifelong habit is to allow the freedom of choice in what they read.

And thanks to a move toward more intricate and sophisticated plotlines and diversified genres, kids and teenagers have an increasing array of books to choose from. Though she states “nonfiction has never been better,” fiction receives by far the most requests from children; light romance, fantasy fiction series, and graphic novels remain perennial favorites. Adventure narratives that appeal to both boys and girls as well an emerging Young Adult genre of “Urban” or “Gangster” fiction are proving to be wildly popular, particularly among teenagers in juvenile detention or at-risk-youth programs.

In an article on teen reading trends for About.com, Elizabeth Kennedy writes that libraries are encouraging teens to read by providing them not just with a special section of bookshelves amidst the libraries’ larger collection, but actually creating “Teen Spaces” just for them. Supplied with comfortable furniture, high-speed Internet access, homework help, and an area for group study and school projects, these areas focus on getting kids into the library and keeping there by creating an environment where reading is an enjoyable activity to be shared with peers.

Kennedy cites Phoenix Public Library’s “Teen Central” space as an excellent example of such an environment. Likewise, the Multnomah County Library system helps organize weekly “teen lounges” during which meeting rooms of nine county branch libraries are taken over for teen use: reading, homework help, and computer access.

Laurel Winter, an Adult Reference Librarian at the Hollywood Library (Portland, Oregon) also sponsors that branch’s Teen Council, a group of five students in grades six through twelve who volunteer to create and promote literacy programs among other teenagers. This year they used all of their 2008 budget, provided by the Library Foundation, to create a writing contest for young writers because they “care passionately about literacy.”

Winter comments that these teenagers first approached her with the idea because they were “worried by their classmates’ bragging that they hadn’t read a book in a year” and wanted to do something to get their peers more involved in reading and writing. Eight awards will be given out Wednesday evening, August 27, at the Hollywood Library to recognize the two best writers of poetry and prose in the sixth-through-eighth and the ninth-through-twelfth grade levels. Popular young adult author and current Portland resident Blake Nelson, author of the extremely successful Paranoid Park, helped to serve on the judging committee.

Blake Nelson isn’t the only headliner to participate in local efforts to promote literacy. Rick Riordan, author of the explosively popular mythology/fantasy Percy Jackson and the Olympians series will be conducting an author lecture later this fall for the library’s annual teen readers event. Through private donations and working closely with local schools, nearly a thousand students are expected to attend the upcoming lecture, with the hope that all will be excited to read.

With two young adult titles scheduled for release in 2009, Three Muses Press is also striving to appeal to young adult readers with enticing coming-of-age stories revolving around strong protagonists that readers can relate to. Moreover, these novels quietly inform readers about what it was like to live during certain historical periods; a method for absorbing information with a higher chance of success than facts gleaned from a textbook.

There are many ways for individuals to help promote literacy and turn a young reader into an adult reader. By volunteering your time in a mentorship program, donating books to at-risk youth or children’s hospitals or even just a monetary donation to your local library or grant-giving foundation, you can help turn reading from a chore into a lifelong pleasure.

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Public libraries offer many family reading opportunities and summer reading programs for free. The American Librarian Association’s teen page (and blog) YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) also provides information about books, reading, and other topics to teenagers and librarians, though they also publish information that could be useful to educators, publishers, or marketers. http://yalsa.ala.org/blog

Sources:
http://childrensbooks.about.com/od/5youngadultbooks/a/teen_reading.htm
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/306531_teenlit08.html