Adolescent reading habits: The effect of school activities on reading practices.

Classrooms in Catalonia are governed by the general laws of the Spanish state, which in turn are specified and developed by the Catalan government taking into account socio cultural particularities of context and local pedagogical traditions. The interest of sociology in adolescent reading became prominent when European surveys began to show a decrease in reading in the 1970s and 1980s. The concern caused by these poor results led studies to focus on the adolescent population in schools. It was considered that this population could be influenced since it was in the process of being educated. The relationships between school reading and personal reading are extremely complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, the boundaries between the two types of reading are blurred because personal reading space is diminished with the passage of time as students tend to read less; on the other hand, tensions appear between free voluntary reading and institutional reading, creating a profound division between the two.