The debut book by YouTube personality Zoella has been voted the most popular title by secondary school children, in the UK’s widest study of British children’s reading habits.
The eighth annual What Kids Are Reading survey, which this year measured trends in 725,369 children’s reading habits in more than 3,300 UK schools, considers the most read titles – indicating the number of times a book was read in school – and the most popular books picked by children.
The most read book at primary level was Roald Dahl’s The Twits, while the most popular was Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney, the ninth in the cartoon-fiction hybrid series. Both the most read and the most popular primary lists were dominated by Kinney titles, with four titles by UK comedian David Walliams.
For secondary schools, the most read title was Kinney’s ninth Wimpy Kid book, while Zoella’s book Girl Online was the most popular. Focused on a teenage blogger and her relationship with a rock star, Girl Online sold 78,109 copies in its first week, the highest first-week sales since Nielsen BookScan began collecting data in 1998.
Zoella, whose real name is Zoe Sugg, has more than 10m YouTube subscribers but attracted criticism from fans when it was revealed that Girl Online was ghostwritten by author Siobhan Curham. The 24-year-old admitted at the time that she was given “help” writing the book, saying: “Everyone needs help when they try something new. The story and the characters of Girl Online are mine.”
Kinney was the most popular author overall, followed by Walliams, picture book author Roderick Hunt, Dahl, and Horrid Henry author Francesca Simon in fifth position. This is almost identical to last year, when Kinney was first, Dahl and Hunt held joint second, followed by Walliams, Simon, and Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson and Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins in joint fifth place.
The report, compiled by Renaissance Learning, said that the absence of nonfiction titles on the list may be because girls are known to favour fiction. The report asks: “Is this a gendered preference, so that the predominantly female primary school teachers and the half of secondary school teachers who are female prefer fiction and are unconsciously promoting fiction at the expense of nonfiction and disadvantaging boys?”.
The report’s author, Keith Topping, who is professor of educational and social research at Dundee University, said that the findings revealed primary school children were reading “at a much higher level of difficulty and with a greater level of comprehension than those recommended to them”. He suggested children were most effective at recommending challenging books to each other, instead of relying on teachers and librarians.
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Julie King, a primary school teacher in Nottinghamshire, said she felt teachers and librarians should still be on hand to push children further. “Peer recommendation is something really important but sometimes they do need to be pointed to something more difficult. They can get into a rut where they read the same authors and books again and again. Children tend to read for that instant feedback, usually something funny, which isn’t always challenging. But I think this isn’t a problem only kids face – we’ve become a country of trashy readers. If you go into an airport bookshop, the book you see aimed at adults could be read by 13-year-olds. There is nothing like Austen these days.”
The report found that while the average difficulty of books rose as pupils got older, it did not match the rate at which reading skills should be improving. It found that difficulty spikes for UK children in year six, but plateaus until year 11, after which it declines. This is an improvement on past years, however, when difficulty declined from year nine. “It is still the case that if the older readers challenged themselves more, better reading outcomes could be anticipated,” the report reads.
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King said she had pupils in her primary school who were “reading more classic books than ever before – JRR Tolkien, books of that level” and that this could “tell you who will get an A* in English among my students now. It is not rocket science.” However, the loss of in-class reading time and the closure of libraries were not helping time-starved parents get their children to read, she said, adding that the recurrence of the same few authors and titles on both primary and secondary lists came down to the promotion of those titles in bookstores. “These books are available more freely and more cheaply. If a parent goes into a bookshop and hasn’t researched, they will just buy something that is a known quantity… rather than risking something unknown, which is quite sad really.”
Source:YouTube celebrity Zoella's Girl Online voted schoolchildren's favourite book