Background: Literacy is an important skill that is necessary for people--especially adolescents--to access electronic media, including mobile devices. The only way to develop competence in reading is by reading more. Young people who enjoy leisure reading are usually more successful readers. In this study, the authors did research into a group of…

Compelling international evidence illustrates the potential of reading for pleasure for enhancing student reading achievement along with other learning and wellbeing outcomes. Yet profound challenges exist for nations seeking to encompass attention to students' volitional reading. In this paper we critically review the growing research evidence in…

The increasing use of digital technologies has implications for reading. Online and on-screen reading often consist of engaging with multiple, short, multimedia snippets of information, whereas longform reading is in decline. Meta-analyses have identified a screen inferiority when reading informational texts, but not narrative texts. The mode…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of early shared reading and access to books on reading vocabulary in middle childhood and the pathways associated with later reading success. Method: Path analysis of data from four waves of a national longitudinal study of children (N = 7,751) was used to investigate direct and indirect effects of…

This paper examines the perspectives of children in two East London primary schools on what influences their independent choice of text, in the context of developing reading for pleasure in schools. All children in three selected year groups (ages approximately 6, 8 and 10) were invited to take part in the research, and from those that…

Reading for Pleasure (RfP) acknowledges the importance of reader engagement and the role of the teacher as a reader of children's literature. The foundational work of the Teachers as Readers (TARs) programme successfully illustrated the impact of RfP activities on student learning. Previous studies of teachers' reader identities have shown a…

Drawing on data from a mobile ethnography study of 12 adolescents from one secondary school, this article proposes to examine the everyday digital reading resources and practices of Singapore adolescent youths to better understand the print and new media (fiction) leisure reading habits of adolescents. Mobile ethnography, with its capacity to…

The aim of this interview study is to explore how skilled readers use their homes as their reading space, while paying attention to what 'home' refers to, what they read there, the 'where' and 'when' aspects of reading at home, and home reading rituals. We conducted semistructured in-depth interviews with ten university students (four from Croatia…

The Rivers of Reading methodology has been used previously to explore children's reading development, but very little research focusing on multilingual children exists. Similarly, reading for pleasure in multiple languages has received little attention. This paper addresses both these gaps. Seven children aged 8-13, across six multilingual…

Children's reading for pleasure is associated with significant academic and personal benefits and is widely recognised as an effective way to leverage social change, yet in schools this is not fully capitalised upon. The authors connect extant research in this area to the seminal concepts of Funds of Knowledge and Funds of Identity to advance the…

Portable mobile technologies and high-speed access to the internet has led to the development of new online-first reading materials such as Korean Manhwa or webtoons, designed for quick consumption on mobile devices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 11 adolescent girls aged 14 to 15 years old, this study examines why and how adolescents read…

Self-directed learning (SDL) requires students to take initiative to learn and control their own learning process. Literature highlights the importance of SDL for lifelong learning. Yet, little understanding is known regarding how to support SDL at the school level, specifically for out-of-class learning context. To fill up this gap, this research…

Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the…

Over the last years, the hashtag #BookTok has been viewed more than 100 billion times on TikTok. Hence, both scholars and practitioners have plead for integrating #BookTok in the literacy classroom, expressing the hope that this digital subculture might flip adolescents' conceptions of reading and improve their reading motivation. This article…

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between parents' reading motivation and leisure reading frequency and their children's reading motivation. Secondary data analysis was used to examine a sample of almost 330,000 Chilean adolescents. The results of multilevel regression models revealed that parents' reading motivation and…