| Summary: | This study explores how the readership of twelve- to thirteen-year-old readers who regularly read for a variety of purposes and pleasures is constructed. It offers a counterweight to the largely quantitative surveys of young people's reading which tend to cluster readers in broad categories; instead, it concentrates on individual readers' trajectories as they develop over time in the spaces created by their interrelation with trajectories of other readers and texts. The aim is to create a rich and complex description of readers showing the effects of different social interactions and cultural values on the changing dynamics of their reading. The research was initiated within a high-achieving English class as they moved from Year 8 into Year 9 in a rural comprehensive school. Four research methods were designed to generate data: students created collages to chart formative events in their reading histories, engaged in semi-structured small-group interviews conducted by the researcher, carried out semi-structured interviews with a parent, carer or grandparent and wrote journals during their independent reading of a selfselected book. Data analysis included a variety of procedures to enable close, critical reading of the material generated and the tracing of readers' trajectories. The study is intended to make an original contribution to the understanding of all those concerned with young people's reading in the context of secondary education in particular by bringing together different theoretical perspectives - not only the social and cultural but also the spatial and historical - exploring insights and tensions arising from their juxtaposition. Because of the deliberate focus on the distinctiveness of individual readers, my intention is not to produce generalisable results but a reconfiguration of material which offers fresh perspectives on young readers and a methodology which will be replicable in other contexts.
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