The purpose of this study was to investigate high school educators' perspectives on obstacles and motivational factors to student pleasure reading. The study explains aspects of students' desires to read as a pleasure activity along with which aspects serve as obstacles to pleasure reading as perceived by English teachers and librarians. Through a…

The current study's purpose was to validate a revised Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS; Kuijpers et al., 2014) as a measure of habitual adolescent reading engagement. This approach to measuring reading engagement reflects the multidimensionality and theoretical alignment that is currently missing from the reading engagement literature.…

Locally and nationally, English Learners (ELs) struggle to achieve parity with their monolingual peers in reading. In addition to second language-related considerations, ELs' efforts to succeed in reading may be thwarted by poverty, trauma, interrupted education, barriers to effective instruction and parental engagement, limited parental…

Recreational reading is in a decline for upper elementary aged readers, and along with this decline comes consequent declines in students' ability to make meaning from what they read and their acquisition of different language forms, including the acquisition of new vocabulary words. However, one reading format is increasing in popularity: graphic…

Classroom libraries are spaces that can be used by teachers to promote voluntary reading; however, classroom libraries are also complex spaces that require teachers to consider both purpose and function in order to motivate and engage middle school students in voluntary reading. The purpose of this action research study was to understand the…

Standardization has been part of teaching and learning in the United States since the late 19th century. This technocratic approach has gained more traction in the past two decades beginning with the passage of the landmark No Child Left Behind law in 2001 and continuing through the recent standardization movement to restrict content and…

The ability to read, the single most important skill students need for learning, has been on the decline across the nation while student interest in books has also waned. Yet, despite the flagging interest in, and proficiency with, reading, English Language Arts (ELA) instruction has remained largely unchanged especially in grades 6-12. The…

According to the National Reading Panel's (2000) report, there was not enough evidence in previous reading research to recommend the instructional practice of having students spend classroom time reading independently. The 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress report, however, reported that more than half of fourth grade and eighth grade…

This study utilized a systematic review methodology to explore best practices in improving reading fluency. The literature was searched to determine how the current curricular trends of technology, phonemic awareness and phonics, independent reading, and complex text and vocabulary can improve reading fluency in K-12 students. Potential studies…

Elementary students' literacy skills are decreasing nationwide ("The Nation's Report Card," 2019). This is concerning because as literacy skills slip, the literacy demands for American workers are steadily increasing (OECD, 2013). Unfortunately, adding to the situation is the fact that students' attitudes towards reading are worsening…

Readers' advisors are tasked with suggesting leisure reading materials to library patrons. The current discourse within the field has it that these advisors ought to adhere to (what I am calling) a "pure preference satisfaction model" wherein they aim to satisfy readers' existing preferences without judging or attempting to alter them.…

This dissertation reports out the results from a socio-cultural media research study that examined how professional periodicals written for United States K-12 public school literacy educators described fanfiction-based recreational literacy practices between 2003 and 2013. In the first decade of the 21st century, many K-12 literacy scholars…

Research into the effects of extensive reading (ER) in second language acquisition has surged over the past few decades. Many studies report several benefits that come from engaging in ER, including reading rate gains. However, these studies almost exclusively focus on English language learners and tend to be limited by their lack of control over…

Moving beyond purposes for reading as fixed outcomes, this dissertation project explores the possibilities of affect theory for decentering or weakening those purposes so they might be seen as one element among many interacting in the classroom space. Because these purposes become the expected outcomes of reading with youth in secondary English…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the motivation and amotivation to read of 9th-12th grade adolescents in a large semi-urban high school in southwestern North Carolina. The principal theory guiding this study is Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 1991, 1994, 2000) as it explicates three universal human needs…