Adolescent girls' perceptions of their textual literacy experiences in a reading for pleasure setting in South Africa

摘要

Reading for pleasure is a topic often overlooked in literacy research. Given reading for pleasure's personal, academic, and social relevance, it should be considered a foreground factor in literacy studies. This case study draws from a sociocultural approach and uses Third Space Theory and Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading to explore adolescents' perceptions and enactments of their bilingual textual literacy experiences in a reading club in a South African township. In line with a sociocultural approach, a broader definition of text was used to include print texts and non-print texts such as oral narratives.;Five participants were selected through criterion-based sampling. The contexts under study were: the home, classroom, reading club, and social events selected by each participant. The triangulated data sources that informed the study were individual interviews, observations, field notes, reading logs, photographs, and photocopies of documents. The researcher conducted a cross-case analysis that included codification, categorization, and identification of patterns and themes.;The findings showed the participants' idea of a good story included print and non-print texts with plots that quickly unfold and themes related to youth culture. During the school's allotted pleasure reading period called the Literacy Half Hour, the participants read books, magazines, newspapers, and used the period to study and complete class assignments. The participants maintained a pleasure reading practice at home and at the reading club. They engaged with Xhosa and English texts in efferent and aesthetic modes. The participant-led hybridized literacy practices in the reading club included print text reading, proposals for story titles, improvised oral narratives, icebreakers, and a question and answer portion. They drew from visual texts, oral texts, and life texts in their imaginative bilingual oral narratives and imbued them with performative elements. Language, culture, choice, and interest played important roles in their perceptions and enactments of text.;The conclusions drawn were that the participants situated themselves differently across contexts. Their hybrid literacy practices produced and were produced by a convergence and overlap within and across contexts. The binaries of formal and informal literacy practices did not apply to their engagement with texts as an individual and social practice.