Hope collection

How can teachers effectively encourage boys' engagement and enjoyment in reading fiction?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Expand fiction availability:
  Regularly update classroom and school libraries with diverse fiction choices appealing to boys, to sustain their interest and voluntary reading habits.

• Encourage choice:
  Provide opportunities for boys to choose fiction books aligned with their personal interests, improving their self-concept as readers.

• Highlight fiction enjoyment:
  Integrate book discussions and peer recommendations about popular fiction series, making reading an enjoyable social activity.

• Challenge stereotypes:
  Actively avoid gender stereotypes related to non-fiction for boys and recommend fiction books across a wide range of topics and genres to all students.

• Support reading growth:
  Recognise and facilitate boys’ transition to more sophisticated fiction as their reading skills develop, fostering confidence and sustained reading engagement.

Abstract

This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews (n = 30) with Year 4 (8 to 9-year-old) boys at six schools, we consider their personal recounts of their enjoyment in reading, their preferred reading choices and narratives related to their experiences as readers at school. Analysis highlights boys’ emerging reading interests, sophisticated and specific reading preferences, and changes in reading identities over time. Boys’ preferences for particular fiction authors, novel series and genres dispute the common assumption in educational contexts that boys prefer to engage with non-fiction books. This finding is significant, as negative gendered stereotypes can impact on boys’ reading self-concepts. It is also critical given Jerrim and Moss’s recent research highlighting the importance of fiction in the development of reading skills. We consider implications for pedagogical practices that broaden reading experiences for the diversity of emerging masculine reading identities in nations such as Australia, where there is an absence of reading for pleasure in education policies.

Full paper access

Scholes, Laura, Spina, Nerida and Comber, Barbara. (2021). Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse : Primary school boys who love reading fiction. British Educational Research Journal. 47(1), pp. 163-180.

Contact the researcher

Associate Professor Laura Scholes
laura.scholes@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Associate Professor Laura Scholes’s research