Creating Life-long Readers Using YA Literature as a Bridge to the Classics

Abstract

Secondary school teachers should support the development of their students’ reading preferences and of their reading autonomy. Unfortunately, most of the literary pieces used in the secondary classroom contain characters and situations with which our students do not identify. We seem to ignore that being able to appreciate classical literature takes time and an academic maturity that many school students have not yet developed. It is a reality that students must become readers first and then develop the necessary skills to understand more complex plots and the literary techniques used to achieve them. In this work we propose that an intertextual study that uses youth literature as a base can help students create links that allow them to face more complex texts with greater confidence in their reading skills. On the other hand, we also claim that the nature of literacy has changed with the appearance of new technologies and contend that we should bear in mind that printed literature is not the only useful ‘literature’ we can recommend to our students. Eventually, we propose the use of Jung’s theory of the archetypes so as to employ YA literature as a bridge to the classics.

Keywords

• literacy
• classical literature
• youth literature
• intertextual
• bridge
• archetypes