Oooh, It’s Sooo Good!!!: Black Adolescent Females Experiencing the Delicacy of Reading

Black adolescent females have largely been neglected in the research literature on their avid reading. While Gibson (2010) explained that Black girls are often portrayed in the literature as struggling and even "remedial" readers, those Black adolescent females who are avid readers receive even less attention. The purpose of this study, then, was to investigate the voracious reading proclivities of this population in order to provide a balanced view of Black adolescent females' reading lives. The findings of this phenomenological study indicate that these five participants go beyond loving reading; they crave it. The meaning of reading for these participants is caught up in their relationships with role models, preference for solitude while reading, and the desire for social interactions after having read texts. This study is significant because it provides a different perspective on the traditional literacy of Black adolescent females. Keywords: Black Females, Adolescents, Phenomenology, Avid Readers, Reading Black adolescent females have largely been neglected in the research literature on their avid reading. While Gibson (2010) explained that Black girls are often portrayed in the literature as struggling and even "remedial" readers, those Black adolescent females who are avid readers receive even less attention. Through the use of phenomenology, this researcher closely examined the practices, mindsets, and contexts of these avid readers, up close and personal, through their eyes and perspectives in order to understand Black adolescent female readers anew. This phenomenological study was designed to examine this population of readers by asking: In what ways do five Black adolescent females undergo and respond to reading experiences and contexts? Before answering this question, one must first unpack the problem. Before unpacking the problem, it should be noted that throughout the findings, metaphors for enjoying food delicacies are used because the girls experienced reading as a delicacy to be enjoyed. Erykah (1), a Black adolescent female I talked with in relationship to this study, and Kayla, one of the participants, repeatedly commented on a book, or book series with, "It was sooo good," as if they had tasted a highly desired food. Erykah was the first of the Black females to catch my attention with the phrase, "It [a book series] was sooo good." When talking about her favorite out-of-school book series, The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), Erykah shared how she tried to persuade her family to read it or hear her talk about it because "it was sooo good." As she described her most treasured reading experiences, her descriptions, voice inflections, and body language seemed similar to those of food connoisseurs. She was deeply steeped and in love with text beyond word description; it was similar to tasting the best food ever. Therefore, although she was not a participant, Erykah's conversation with me when she repeatedly used the phrase, "it was sooo good," helped launch my investigation into the meaning of reading for the other Black females in this study, one of whom, Kayla, also used the phrase. All in all, through the investigation, I found that, for these participants, reading and thinking were life-sustaining for them every bit as much as food. Conceptual Background The Problem Although more Black adolescent females are performing better in reading, these gains have largely been unexamined. At the secondary and post-secondary levels, boys have long outperformed girls on national measures of reading performance (Cohen, White, & Cohen, 2012). Even though recent evidence indicates that this gender gap is reversing, especially for reading (Freeman, 2004), the emphasis on Black adolescent female struggling readers prevails. For example, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that 12th grade females in 2005 outperformed male students in reading by a wider margin than they did in 1992. …