Literary and Pragmatic Reading Culture of Young People in the Post-[Covid]-Modern Era

Findings from the DaLeSS Study

Abstract

The question of the future of reading books – especially printed books and literary reading – in an increasingly digitalized media landscape has long been considered archetypal. For several decades, it has occupied literary studies, reception and media research, cultural theory, and literature education. With the Covid-19 pandemic, a profound and accelerated digitalization of reading culture emerged within the education system: online schooling and four consecutive semesters of online university teaching turned on-screen reading into a central foundation of knowledge acquisition and a fixed component of everyday school and university life. How young people perceive this development is the research question of the DaLeSS study, which was conducted in 2023 with 1,056 upper-secondary students and student teachers. Among the aspects examined were their analog and digital reading habits, their reading motivation and reading preferences (e.g., fiction versus non-fiction), their use of e-books, and their consumption of literary and pragmatic text types, both printed and digital. The present contribution presents selected findings, focusing on the use of e-books as well as on analog and digital reading of literary text types.