According to the authors, more stories are told in public centres than in private ones, with a significant difference in the 2nd stage, although the frequency generally reduces as students start to make progress. However –according to Jesús Pérez González and Elena Gómez-Villalba Ballesteros—private centres students have read more stories, with a significant difference in the 3rd stage.
According to the authors of the book, who have carried out their research work with students between 9 and 12 years old, “we are living in a society that does not contribute to the development of habits which require concentration, effort or abstraction, which can lead in children of these ages to problems from reading disability to real disorders in the reading mechanic in certain cases.”
In four chapters and more than 300 pages, this book studies recreational reading and linguistic abilities teaching and reports the results obtained in a research work through a scientific survey carried out with students of the 2nd and 3rd stage. According to the study the great majority of the students do not read at home because “they read enough at home already” and girls read a little bit more than boys of school age.
According to Jesús Pérez González and Elena Gómez-Villalba Ballesteros, authors of the book “Recreational reading and basic linguistic abilities learning”, by doing a comparative study between the experimental and control groups of the two stages of this sample you can check that “they are very homogeneous as regards their contact with oral stories, readings, reasons for not reading at home, abundance of books in the family context, reading habits of their parents and relationship with libraries”.
There is a constant among the results of this singular research work the vast majority agrees on: “In general, there are many books at homes and more than a half of the children in the survey have a lot of books in their bedroom, but only 26,6 % in the 2nd stage and 51,7 % in the 3rd stage see their parents reading frequently; in both cases the percentage of students is significantly higher in private than in public centres”.
Another singular fact is about the frequency students visit the library: “A quarter of the students of both stages do never visit the library. There are not activities planned because, even in those centres where there is a library, the proportion of students who regularly visits it is very low.”
Reference: Professor Elena Gómez-Villalba Ballesteros
Dpt. Department of Didactics of Language and Literature. University of Granada
Phone number: 958 243963 / 243965.
E-mail. egomezv@ugr.es