Moving Into New Literacies?

Abstract

The level of researchers and educators knowledge about young people's current reading practices, interests, and literacy trends is impressively low. Many international reports point out the fact that today's young generation's reading habits are diminishing to critical levels and digital technologies are pointed out as the main cause. Rather than locating digital practices as a prejudice or a benefit for promoting students' literacy, this chapter aims to explore today's young people's conceptualizations and practices around reading. It presents a qualitative study that seeks to describe and in-depth understand the vision of a group of Portuguese young people from 15 to 23 years old. Results are organized in order to describe what is reading from today's young people's point of view, what they read, if they enjoy reading the curriculum-conveyed literature, which formats young people prefer to read, and how they select what to read. The discussion of these results is made through the lenses of multiliteracies approach.