Critical Engagements: Adolescent African American Girls & Urban Fiction

Although one of the ultimate goals of teaching English is to instill a love of reading, motivating students' engagement in texts poses a problem for many teachers. Despite research which suggest that adolescents, generally, do not read voluntarily (Strommen, 2004), adolescents, indeed, are often engaged with texts during their leisure time that are very different from those found in traditional classrooms that emphasize classical literature (Schultz & Hull, 2002). Creating bridges between their leisure reading interests and those presented in schools is one way of ideally bolstering more traditional forms of reading achievement within schools. Urban fiction is a form of text that is capturing the leisure reading interests of growing numbers of adolescent African American girls.