Vol. 11, Special Issue 10 (2022)

Independent knowledge acquisition and lifelong learning are dependent on a culture of reading books. It instils in a person the necessary traits for personal growth, increasing their chances of expanding their mental horizons and becoming more successful in life. However, today's youth prefer to spend their free time on the internet, mobile phones, social media sites, television, entertainment programmes, and reading a book in a quiet corner of a library has become a thing of the past for most people. The present study was an attempt to explore the reading habits of adolescents (15-19 years) in Golaghat district of Assam. By using a multi-stage sampling procedure, a sample of 342 numbers of adolescents from eight schools of the East and South educational blocks of Golaghat district were drawn randomly from classes 9-12, considering the students belong to the age group of 15-19 years. A self-constructed questionnaire was prepared to collect the required information from all the respondents. The collected data were coded and analyzed using IBM SPSS. The results revealed that adolescents’ ‘purpose of reading’ had the highest mean value (Mean=23.88), followed by their ‘preference for reading’ (Mean=13.54), and factors militating against reading habits’ (Mean=22).