Adolescent reading and the reproduction of literary judgement: what adolescent book reviews of self-selected texts reveal

Abstract

A contrast is sometimes drawn between prescribed literary texts that develop literary judgement and, contrasting with them, self-selected texts read for pleasure. There is some scepticism in literature didactics about the ability of the latter to develop adolescents' literary judgement. This article reports on a study that questions this scepticism. One aim of the study was to establish whether and how adolescent readers can offer intersubjectively comprehensible and discursively negotiable judgements about the literary quality of texts with which they autonomously engage. A second aim was to determine with which elements of fictional texts they connect these literary qualities. We analysed 55 texts from a corpus of 450 reviews on the Swiss internet site www.jugendbuchtipp.ch in which adolescent readers write about self-selected books. These reviews provide information on the preferences of adolescent readers as well as their ability to perceive and convey their judgements on literary quality. We initially drew on concepts of literary evaluation from reception theory and then further inductively developed a 35-category analytic grid. Participants in a literature didactics research seminar at the University of Basel were closely involved in devising this grid with which to classify the various qualities of evaluation that adolescent readers applied in their reviews. Our analyses confirmed that adolescent readers do verbalise their judgements in intersubjectively understandable statements and arguments. These judgements focus on emotions, the perspective of characters, and the poetic form of texts, three aspects considered central in notions of literary judgement that are currently authoritative in literature didactics. Our findings suggest that autonomously selected texts can provide reading pleasure as well as develop the ability to deliver literary criticism. For literature didactics, our study illustrates the knowledge that teachers may derive from adolescent readers' book reviews about their learners' reading processes and their processes of literary judgement. Furthermore, involving students in the study, enhanced their capacity as prospective teachers to promote the development of adolescent readers' literary judgement. 2ANDREA BERTSCHI-KAUFMANN AND TANJA GRABER

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