I. Preface
Light Novels originate from Japanese literature for adolescent readers and are an emerging form of entertaining literary works, which can be literally referred to as “novels for easily enjoyed reading”, with verbal content that reflects common speech and topics such as adolescence, schools, fantasy, reasoning, and romance, so readers can easily read the works and which are well liked by Taiwan adolescents. While there is a corpus of existing domestic Taiwan and international studies of adolescent reading behavior, relatively few explore the social dialogue and interaction of this emerging genre of light novels and their adolescent readers. This study thus explores adolescents aged 12 to 18 in New Taipei City as the study subjects, using a questionnaire survey method to elicit their light novel reading motivation, reading behaviors and reader backgrounds to elucidate their different reading motivations and reading behaviors.
II. Literature Review
1. Adolescent Reading Motivation
The objective of discussing light novel reading motivation is to
ascertain and appreciate adolescents participation in reading this body of literature, and the internal aspects of their maintaining such reading activities. Wigfield and Guthrie (1995) previously systematically explored reading motivations, proposing dimensions to elucidate reading motivation, and this study adopts their Reading Motivation Scale dimensions as the basic framework herein.As light novels generally represent “extracurricular reading”, they usually represent an individual’s reading preferences. Hence, reference is made to empirical studies on extracurricular reading (Mellon, 1990; Wicks, 1995; Hopper, 2005; Hughes-Hassell & Rodge, 2007), and after comparison with the reading motivation dimensions of Wigfield and Guthrie (1995), the following six dimensions are found to be most important for adolescent extracurricular enjoyment reading motivation: curiosity, challenge, importance, recognition, social, and compliance. Additionally, the light novels’ story background are frequently built on a framework of a fantasy society, satisfaction of “imagination” has been deemed one of the readers’ “intrinsic motivations”. Also, the light novels’ manga comic book style illustrations are an important factor in attracting reader attention, so the works’ “visuality” are one of the “extrinsic motivations”, serving to identify one of the distinguishing literary characteristics of light novels.
2. Adolescent Reading Behavior
“Reading behavior” can be understood as representing the reading related coalescence of internal psychological drive and external stimulus resulting in measurable explicit activities. Reading behavior related discussions often consider the themes of: reading times, prevalence, and reading breadth; and the types of works read are also considered an important scope of reading behavior (Guthrie, Schafer, Wang &
Afflerbach, 1995; Wigfeld & Guthrie, 1997). This study in considering the aforementioned papers, deems reading behavior to consist of the following items: reading prevalence, reading times, reading quantity, reading topical types and sources of reading materials; but, in the digital era, the addition of reading medium is also considered a reading behavior in this study.
Factors affecting adolescent reading include reader background factors and literature factors. Individual background factors include the three main significant factors of “gender”, ”age”, and “family socioeconomic status”
(Greaney, 1980; Delin, Delin & Cram, 1995; Shumow, Schmidt & Kackar, 2008), so this study adopts those factors to consider individual background impacts on differences in “light novel” reading motivation and behavior.
III. Research Method
This study deploys a “questionnaire survey” , which can afford maximal expression of subject responses, among the subject cohorts of junior high and high school and vocational high school students in New Taipei City, Taiwan. As the sample is large and distributed, a two phase approach was deployed, with the first phase consisting of “stratified sampling”, with six junior high schools, four high schools, and two vocational high schools selected according to the type of school; in the second phase,
“cluster sampling” was used to select 36 classes. In November, 2015, a pre-test questionnaire was deployed, and between March and April, 2016 the final questionnaire was distributed, with a total of 1,355 questionnaires distributed, and 1,222 responses received, for a 90.18% response rate, and 1,160 effective responses.
IV. Research Results and Discussion 1. Adolescent Reading Motivation Analysis
(1) The adolescent reading motivation mean score was 4.236, with
“intrinsic drive motivation” scores higher than those for “extrinsic stimulus motivation”.
(2) Among the reading motivations, “relaxation and enjoyment” was the highest, primarily because, “when reading light novels, I felt very relaxed and joyful”, and “ I felt that after reading a light novel, it released and reduced the stress from my life”. These results indicate that reading light novels imbues a sense of satisfaction from relaxation and enjoyment.
(3) In the dimension of “social interaction”, adolescents frequently noted, “I enjoy recommending good light novels to friends”, and “I feel that discussing light novels with friends which we have both read allows for our friendship to deepen”, indicating that adolescents engage in reading light novels to obtain recognition of friends or to
strengthen their peer bonds.
2. Analysis of different background variables affecting adolescent light novel reading motivation variance
(1) There is statistical significance in the dimension of light novel reading motivation according to adolescent gender, with males enjoying greater statistical significance across all dimensions as compared with females.
(2) Different adolescent age cohorts (junior high, high school) light novel reading motivation scale results indicated only significant difference in the motivational dimension of “peer pressure”, with high school students more subject to peer pressure or recommendations, or to susceptibility of light novel imagery in their choice of reading light novels, than junior high school students.
(3) According to ANOVA analysis, effects of different socioeconomic status of adolescents on light novel reading motivation, indicated that in terms of different socioeconomic status of adolescents, light novel reading motivation dimensions variance revealed homogeneity tests results were not significant.
3. Adolescent light novel reading behavior analysis
(1) Light novel reading frequency and prevalence of “more than once a month” was most frequent (41.7%); with weekly reading of “30 minutes or less” as the most in terms of time (29.5%), with most frequent light novel weekly reading volume of (less than 1 work) (40.4%), indicating that adolescents had not adopted the custom of a heavy load of reading light novels.
(2) In terms of the themes of light novel reading, the three main topics were “fantasy adventure” (22.9%), "romantic love" (17.8%), and
"youth campus life" (17.5%), hence the fantastic and imaginative story structure of light novels tends to satisfy the adolescents expectations for their lives.
(3) Most light novels were read in the medium of “paperbacks”, with only about 20% of adolescents accustomed to reading e-book
versions of light novels. This is primarily due to the lack of e-book publishing variety in Taiwan, and the limited quantities so published;
in addition, e-books require concomitantly usable e-book reader compatible devices, and thus at present the e-book has been unable to replace the paperback as the medium of choice for reading light novels.
(4) As for the means of obtaining light novels, most adolescents accessed them primarily through “purchase by self or family members” (38.2%), followed by “borrowing them from friends or classmates” (23.1%), with the percent of those “borrowing from libraries”(14.8%) being rather low, indicating that library collection accessions of light novels are insufficient to meet the reading demands of adolescents.
4. Analysis of the variance of different backgrounds of adolescent readers on light novel reading behavior
(1) Light novel reading volume indicates that males read more frequently and at greater lengths of time than do females; gender difference was however not statistically significant on the choice of themes of light novels.
(2) Different ages of adolescent readers were not statistically significant factors in terms of reading light novel frequency, amount of time spent reading, volume of reading, medium of reading, or source of reading material. But in terms of preferences for reading themes, junior high schools students were statistically significantly more interested than high school students in reading about “fantasy adventure” and “inspirational courage”; while high school students were statistically significantly more interested than junior high school students in reading about "romantic love" and "youth campus life".
(3) Different family socioeconomic status backgrounds were statistically significant in affecting adolescent light novel reading frequency, indicating that “medium socioeconomic status” adolescents’ reading frequency was higher than adolescents from “low socioeconomic status” and “high socioeconomic status ”backgrounds.
V. Conclusions and Recommendations
Adolescent reading motivations for light novels are strong, and
“relaxation and enjoyment” reflect the primary motive, with male readers enjoying stronger motivation to read this genre than females, with greater frequency of reading light novels, while age and family socioeconomic status did not exercise appreciable affects on the volume of reading light novels. Adolescents mostly enjoyed light novels with the theme of “fantasy adventure”, but high school students preferred romantic works more than junior high school students. This indicates that light novels are accessible for relaxation and enjoyment, providing adolescents with easy access to the world of reading, so it is recommended that peers and teachers maintain an open attitude and widely encourage this trend among adolescents to read light novels, as teachers can use class reading of exemplary light novels to recommend works to adolescents, and rather than excluding the genre as non-mainstream books, perhaps it might be better to select appropriate contents to encourage adolescents to read. Also, in terms of library accession selections, librarians should pay attention to providing adolescents with appropriate light novels, to meet the reading needs of adolescents.