Over the past two years, as a professor of reading education, I have listened to, collaborated, and met with various PreK-12 educators virtually and in person. I collected questions, comments, successes, and challenges related to the ongoing transitions and demands of this post-pandemic era on teachers, students, and parents. The topics of student…

Teachers who are successful at teaching both the skill and the love of reading provide a foundation for lifetime reading. All too often, building motivation for reading is neglected in reading instruction and classrooms. Nine teachers were trained in seven motivational principles and then invited to make an implementation plan using as many of the…

The author, a former early grades teacher, recounts how she overcome erratic curriculum implementation to find her own way to effective reading instruction. What worked for her was an emphasis on explicit phonics in the context of providing engaging and relevant reading material for her students. "As a matter of educating the whole…

Reading motivation is an important contributor to reading achievement. Students with higher levels of motivation tend to outperform those with lower levels. Reading motivation is a dynamic, situational, context-dependent trait that can vary in children over time and across tasks. Teachers have a valuable opportunity to support students' reading…

Reading levels and levelled reading have been tried and true teaching tools used for assessment and to guide the teaching of reading in classrooms for decades. However, identifying students' reading levels does not necessarily lead to success in reading for students. In strictly adhering to an instructional routine based on reading levels and…

This mixed-methods research study focuses on students', teachers', and parents' perceptions of the influence therapy dogs in schools can have on reluctant readers' attitudes about reading and motivation to read at school and at home as well as exploring changes in the participants' oral fluency. Eight student participants read to our school…

This three-paper dissertation was conducted to explore how motivation and engagement, in addition to cognitive aspects, should be considered in disciplinary literacy instruction and assessment in high school classrooms. The studies, which were based on a five-year collaborative school-university partnership, were conducted to explore the relation…

Students may lack the motivation to read for many reasons, including inadequate access to interesting texts, limited encouragement to read for pleasure from adults, instructional practices that do not foster engagement in learning, or a history of reading failure. This article focuses on students with reading disabilities who may have a…

This study applied a qualitative approach and investigated the processes of motivational change through goal setting in extensive reading (ER). The one-year ER program integrating goal setting was introduced in a Japanese university. Interviews were conducted with four selected participants from among 23 students. The results revealed different…

This study investigated the associations among reading strategy instruction, student motivational factors (i.e., attitudes toward reading, reading self-concept, and motivation to read), gender, and reading achievement. The analyses were conducted using the Hong Kong sample (students at Level 1, n = 3,875 and teachers at Level 2, n = 133) from the…

Motivation is thought to contribute to better text comprehension (Grabe, 2009), but L2 reading motivation of adult ESL students in the US is an underexplored area of research. The current study adopted self-determination theory--the concepts of intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, and controlled motivation, in particular--to examine IEP…

This case study examines factors that support guided reading instruction to foster motivation in seventh and eighth grade readers. The goal of the analysis is to answer the following two research questions: ''How do middle school teachers foster the motivation of struggling students?'' and ''How do teachers demonstrate efficacy in teaching using…

The "Ten Principles Teaching Extensive Reading" has appeared in a number of forms, initially as "The characteristics of an extensive reading approach" in Day and Bamford (1998) and later in an article in Reading in a Foreign Language (2002) but in a slightly different form and ordering. What was originally intended to be a…

While the advantages of reading workshops are well known (Atwell, 1998), there is currently a debate among scholars, practitioners, and politicians about the use of instructional/independent level texts in light of the Common Core Standards' end-of-year requirement for students to be reading at grade level (National Governors Association Center…

Summer drift, otherwise known as loss of reading comprehension skills or reading achievement, has been a well-known and well-documented phenomenon of public education for decades. Studies from the late twentieth century to the present have demonstrated a slowdown in summer drift attributed to specific summer reading programs addressing motivation…