The National Endowment for the Arts just published an interesting new study and review of the literature on literacy in the US but it retains a rather exclusive definition of reading (it’s fiction, poetry and drama, in book form) - so web surfing and magazine reading don’t count. It suggests that regular leisure readers are better employed and more skilled at reading (well duh!) I don’t know how they disentangled number of books in the home and leisure reading from social class though - I read somewhere that number of books in the home actually works reasonably well as a proxy for social class.

I would have thought that the increasing amount of leisure web browsing and online writing young people are doing would be beneficial to reading skills. Well, the report is 98 pages long so maybe I’ve missed the part where they tackle this…

I presume that it is only consistent with my having done a first degree in English and being a PhD student now that do a fair amount of leisure reading myself…

Here is a set of handy book-related links I have collected.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Media effects, mass media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.