Adult literacy teachers are constantly searching for effective, engaging and distinctly 'adult' ways to develop adult emergent reading and, for at least the past two hundred years, adults have formed themselves into reading circles to read and discuss novels on a weekly or monthly basis. Why then are reading circles rarely used, or studied, in formal adult literacy provision? This book explores adult reading development, novel reading and reading circles in the context of a wider examination of reading pedagogies and practices in the English-speaking world. It discusses reading as both an individual and a communal act and investigates the relationship between literature and literacy development, practice and pedagogy (including a reassessment of the controversial approaches of reading aloud and phonics for adults). Sam Duncan reviews a case study of an adult reading circle in a large London further education college and identifies the wider implications for the teaching and learning of adult emergent reading, for the use and understanding of reading circles and for how we understand the novel reading experience more broadly.

Sam Duncan is Lecturer in Education in the Department of Lifelong and Comparative Education at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK. She has previously taught adult literacy, English as a foreign language and poetry, film and drama on adult return to study programmes.

Introduction \ 1. The Charted Waters of Reading: How Reading is Claimed, Researched and Defined by Different Fields \ 2. Reading and Adult Life \ 3. How We Learnt to Read \ 4. Literature and Literacy Development \ 5. Reading Circles \ 6. Researching a Reading Circle: What We Did \ 7. Researching a Reading Circle: What We Found \ 8. Reading as Experience \ 9. Reading Circles as 'Ideal Pedagogy' \ 10. The Individual and the Communal \ 11. The Pleasures and Politics of Novel Reading and Reading Circles \ Conclusion \