I recently wrote a literature review about helping students enter Book World–a.k.a. the flow of reading. Here are some interesting points that came up about boys:
- There is negative peer pressure as boys struggle to be viewed as masculine (Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Watson, et.al., 2010).
- Negative attitudes are contagious (Merisuo-Storm, 2006), which makes it important to identify and hook those students with negative attitudes first, before the disease spreads.
- Boys do not have enough male models which is highly important as attitudes about reading develop early (Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004), especially in the area of viewing reading as recreation (Boltz, 2007).
- Boys tend to read brief, informative texts (Boltz, 2007; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004), where classroom read-alouds tend to be narrative.
- Boys prefer non-fiction, comics, how-to manuals, graphic novels, sports, adventure, fantasy, humor, horror, and series books (Boltz, 2007; Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004). Part of the appeal of series books is that boys can guarantee that they don’t accidentally pick out a “girl book” (Merisuo-Storm, 2006). This is information that we can use. If we can hook boys on a series they’ve got a reading plan laid out for a while.
- Some studies show that boys are hard-wired to enjoy action books because they have less cross-hemispheric activity, thus needing an extra “jolt” in their reading (Boltz, 2007; Sullivan, 2004).
- Teachers and librarians tend to treat “boy books” as sub-standard literature; we need to promote them in book talks (Sullivan, 2004).
As a result of my study, I changed how I shop for books for my class quite a bit. I focused on short-chaptered action books for boys such as are now being written by James Patterson and John Grisham.