Abstract
This thesis is about school non-reading, more specifically about senior high school non-readers, that is to say high school students who shirk their school duty to read the books they work on in the French class. Even if sociology and the science of education have taken an interest in non-readers there is rather little material about this phenomenon which questions the boundaries between reading and non-reading and the practices of teaching literature. The aim of my work is to shed light on this phenomenon with a field survey. After following a class of Year 11 students in a general and technological high school for a year, I sought to describe and understand the practices of school non-readers (SNR). Starting from the definition of non-reading as an activity - as it was developed by P.Bayard in his work “How to talk about books you haven't read” (2007) - I collected the students statements in questionnaires and interviews, their - oral and written - school productions and I filmed literature classes. Classifying the students as school readers or school non-readers raises major theoretical and methodological issues. Once the classifying tool elaborated, my work reveals that non-reading is not a marginal phenomenon in this Year 11 class. However, being a SNR is hardly a status considering how diverse the practices of school non-reading are. There is also a great variety of SNR. Being rarely inactive and unproductive the SNR develop multiple strategies – sometimes efficient ones – to overcome their non-reading, be it before or during the classes dedicated to the works they have not read. These strategies can be confronted to the practices of teaching literature. The task of understanding the works that is led in class appears of the utmost importance to understand the practices of the SNR. Analyzing the – oral and written – productions of the SNR shows that it is possible for a SNR to create a personal link with the ghost book (Bayard, 2007) via the medium of teaching literature. Some SNR even seem to be more involved in the literature class than some school readers. Nevertheless, this state of facts does not concern all the SNR and my work leads to a typology of SNR which distinguishes the converted SNR, the puzzled SNR and the resistant SNR. Hopefully this typology - which is dynamic - will pave new ways to teaching literature highlighting that it can impact some SNR too.