Abstract

The lack of interest in reading among Spanish teenagers has recently become a strong topic of concern in education and society. This presentation will focus on the description of adolescent’s point of view on the academic literacy practices related to the language and literature subjects in compulsory and high school Catalan education. I will report on an ethnographic case-study involving in-depth interviews with a urban school-gang constituted by 4 boys (16 to 18 year-old). Except one of them who is seen in the group as “the best student of the class”, the others are labelled by school and recognized themselves as ‘struggling learners’ and ‘struggling readers’. Following the theoretical framework of the New Literacy’s Studies (Ivanic 1997; Barton 1998) I will peer into its mindsets and appraisals on academic reading culture in order to explain how resistance to academic text is culturally and biographically constructed along schooling. Analysis will pay attention particularly to the vernacular reading practices they have developed for replacing the dominant ones at school, as elaborating cribs, looking up for information in Google, and picking up information about the exam’s questions among classmates and teachers.