THE JUNIOR GRAPHIC AND READING HABITS OF YOUNG TEENAGERS

ABSTRACT

Reading is a skill that is vital to the development of an individual’s mind and for that matter the growth and progression of one’s life. It is even more beneficial for children when they are in their most impressionable stage of development, to develop good reading habits in them as they progress through the various stages of life as pupils, students, and into the adult life of career-hood. Reading for leisure has been seen as an effective way to cultivate the creative and critical thinking skills of children, and to enable them develop strong social skills. Furthermore, recreational reading contributes to the development of literary skills, vocabulary expansion, and memory improvement. This study was designed to find out the reading habits of teenagers from Star International Preparatory School in Teshie, and the Ministry of Health Basic School in Korle Bu. The choice of these two schools was informed by the intuition that pupils from the two schools would differ substantially in terms of their projected socio-economic backgrounds, and this difference should produce differences in terms of access to information generally, and in their leisure reading habits. It used the Junior Graphic newspaper, a leisure (non-academic) reading material, as an indicator of reading habits. A sample size of sixty students was chosen from each school, totalling a hundred and twenty. The study was based on the mass media theories of uses and gratifications and media systems dependency. The research applied quantitative methodology and the survey method of data collection by administering close-ended questionnaires to the sampled students to find out their engagement with the Junior Graphic. The study ascertained why the selected teenagers chose to read the Junior Graphic, what content they normally read in the newspaper, and the reasons for their reading practices. The study found that a majority of respondents read the Junior Graphic for no more than an hour a day, and in effect, that leisure reading was not a habitual or routine part of the media and information habits of teenagers. However, when they read, the reasons have tended to be for purposes of news/information, social validation, and education or knowledge acquisition.