Do young adults read for pleasure or obligation? “Adolescents are not keen on reading. They do it because they have to. If they don’t read for school, they fail the subjects. If you asked them to choose between reading school texts and not doing it, they would definitely choose not to do it.” (A language teacher) This kind of thought has become common today among secondary schools teachers. When it comes to the topic of young adults reading, most of us, will agree that they do not like doing it. What is more, we tend to believe that adolescents only read when they are asked to do so and that they do not enjoy reading since they take it as a school obligation and a waste of time. This paper will describe how young adults do like reading depending on the literary genre but not necessary on their social contexts. At the same time, it will illustrate how we, as teachers of English, have prejudged - before doing the research- teenagers because of their social backgrounds and how results have surprised us. The study reported here and the results obtained come to sustain Amey’s work (1985) who proposes that the reading material has to fulfil the special needs that young adults have. These needs include:
the need for entertainment and information, the need to belong, the need to learn in a social context, the need to experience responsibility, the need to establish a self-concept, the need to communicate with adults who have an interest in them and their concerns.
Adolescents’ needs and likes are two aspects that teachers should have into account when choosing the reading materials as, in fact; the wrong teaching decisions seem to be the reason that cause young adults not to be likely to read school texts. Background and methodology Over the last modifications that the Argentinean Educational System has undergone during the last decades, it is quite common to hear from the conservative sectors of the population, that education is no longer what it used to be, that secondary students do not achieve a high level of competence as they used to, that they no longer read and that if they do, they do not read writers or works that are believed to be classics. Moreover, it is usually believed that young adults’ relationship with literary texts is a forced one and that they do not read for pleasure, but for obligation.