Recreational long-form fiction reading and college-level literacy achievement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract : This study aimed to examine habits around – and, secondarily, attitudes toward – recreational reading of long-form fiction (novels) in a multi-cultural, multilingual student population with a broad range of academic ability, and to determine whether there was any association between such variables and the students' levels of literacy skill. The purpose of the study was to provide English teachers at CEGEP Vanier College and beyond with information about students' reading backgrounds that might help them to make more informed decisions about their curriculum and pedagogy. It was hypothesized that students placed in higher-level 101 courses would report stronger recreational novel-reading habits and more positive attitudes toward reading fiction than those in lower levels. A sample of Vanier College students in fall-semester English 101 courses in 2016 completed a survey questionnaire in which they provided demographic information, as well as information on their recreational reading preferences; their attitudes toward reading books, especially books of fiction; their novel-reading habits in the previous year, and their family of origin's reading habits and attitudes toward reading. Their responses were cross-tabulated with their 101 course placement levels (non-remedial, first-tier remedial, and second-tier remedial) to reveal associations. Students' qualitative responses were examined, and some interesting cases were isolated and treated as case studies. The data showed that there are indeed some important associations between a student's literacy level and the student's attitudes and preferences regarding reading novels for recreation. Associations between student reading habits and literacy level remained unsubstantiated, but warrant further study with a more comprehensive sample. Reader-response theory (Daniels, 2002) posits that students cannot take an analytical approach to literature before experiencing literature personally, and examining and understanding their own responses to it. It could be argued, based on this theory and the data collected in this study, that teachers of remedial courses should endeavour to provide their students with experiences that will help them develop a love of reading and an inclination to do more of it in their own time. Such an argument would entail re-examining not only teachers’ individual curricula and pedagogy, but also Ministerial objectives for CEGEP English courses. Further research would be needed in order to determine ways that teachers might best respond productively to this difference in background reading experiences and attitudes, but some examples from the existing literature on fostering recreational reading habits, enjoyment and skill are provided here for consideration. The hope is that, by looking at overall associations between recreational longform fiction reading and 101 course placement, as well as by examining particular cases of students' literacy skills and reading habits and attitudes around reading, this study of a very particular college in a very particular cultural and academic context will provide Vanier College English teachers with information that can help them examine their own curricular choices and pedagogical approaches, both in their 101 courses and beyond. It is also hoped that this information, analysis and reflection will prove useful to English teachers at other Quebec CEGEPs, as well as to Quebec educators generally, and to post-secondary English educators beyond the Quebec system who work in similar settings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".