In his hugely successful "Connecting Boys with Books" (2003), the author delved into the problem that reading skills of pre-adolescent boys lag behind those of girls in the same age group. In this companion book, Sullivan digs even deeper, melding his own experiences as an activist with perspectives gleaned from other industry experts to help…

Reading logs have become a practice in many elementary schools. Although lack of autonomy undermines intrinsic motivation (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), no study has examined the effect of logs. Second and third-grade students (N = 112) were assigned either a mandatory or voluntary log and surveyed about their motivation to read at…

A lack of implementation of classroom strategies can hinder elementary teachers' efforts to stay current in children's literature and recreational reading activities to promote reading for pleasure to students. Basal and literature-based curricula have been a solution to this problem, but their effectiveness is unclear as teachers are often faced…

In this paper, one 19-year-old married mother who was sexually abused when younger discusses the painful and important role reading has played in her life. By using narrative discourse analysis, I parse the young mother's spoken narrative and illuminate the emotions that cluster around her reading experiences. I discover that she has used reading…

The present study evaluated the effects of classwide satiation and embedded reinforcement procedures on preschoolers' activity preferences during scheduled free-play periods. The goal of the study was to increase time allocation to originally nonpreferred, but important, activities (instructional zone, library, and science) while continuing to…

How much time do college students spend reading for recreational and academic purposes? Do Internet and television use displace or interfere with reading time? In this study, we used an innovative time-diary survey method to explore whether the time students spend on the Internet or watching television displaces time that would be spent reading…

This study extended the research of Aiken (2006), which originally examined the reading motivation, attitudes, and habits for a cohort of 6th grade readers from an affluent suburban community. The purpose of this research was to investigate if the students' self-concepts as readers and values of reading have changed from their 6th grade year…

With the Skills for Life strategy came new professional qualifications for teachers of literacy to adults. Having learned to be literate themselves in the mid-to-late twentieth century, how ready are these teachers to take on the challenges of preparing their learners for the literacies of the new millennium? This paper comes out of doctoral…

A large percentage of the students who drop out of K-12 schools in the United States do so at the end of high school, at some point after grade 10. Yet little is known about the differences between types of students who drop out near the end of high school. The purpose of this study is to examine a typology of high school dropouts from a large…

This study reports the findings of a six-week summer literacy program conducted at a transitional housing facility for homeless families in the Southwestern region of the U.S. This study is grounded on the body of knowledge on students' literacy and homelessness. The intervention included one-on-one instruction by tutors. This study examined…

Encouraging pleasure reading is not traditionally seen as the role of academic libraries. Those students who take time for reading, however, are better poised to succeed in college. Declining rates in reading among young people are cause for alarm, and many libraries at academic institutions are developing programs to promote this pastime. This…

This article illustrates how the use of the basic elements of a story can help create an event that will stimulate imagination and encourage further reading. Margaret Robison, the librarian at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind (VSDB) in Staunton, Virginia, decided that for Teen Read Week she would use a popular series as a bridge to…

In current-day criticisms of consumer culture as well as of the performativity culture of the work place, the originally religious concept of the vice of acedia or sloth is reinterpreted as a virtue. Art, especially poetry, is put to the fore in that connection. The image of the reader is addressed when the question of the relationship between…

Situated in a review of rural, cultural, and youth geographies, this article reports on a qualitative study of the role of reading and libraries in the lives of older rural teenagers. The primary method of data collection was the use of in-depth, flexibly structured interviews with twenty-seven youth between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years,…

In this article, we explore the association between students' value of reading and their behavior during a sustained silent reading (SSR) period, and their attitudes toward SSR and reading leisure books. 362 secondary students participated in this study and data were collected by means of a questionnaire. The results showed that more students in…