Influences on Australian adolescents' recreational reading

Competence in literacy skills has long been associated with educational (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw & Rycik, 1999; Sullivan & Brown, 2015), vocational (Kirsch et al., 2002; Zasacka, 2014) and social achievement (Wilhelm, 2016). Since research indicates that reading as a recreational pursuit improves students’ outcomes on a range of literacy measures, supporting adolescent reading in an age of personal media is a key issue for policy makers in fields as diverse as education, library science, youth programming and arts policy. In order to be effective advocates of reading in this digital era, these diverse stakeholders need to remain abreast of adolescents’ reading engagement frequency, and factors influencing this engagement in a dynamic educational and social environment. As such, this paper seeks to provide insight into how age, gender, place of residency and maternal education may potentially influence adolescents’ intensity of engagement in the literacy-supportive practice of recreational book reading.