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…

Give a child a book and watch them blossom in more ways than you could possibly imagine! Nothing can replace the feel of a book and the turning of pages in anticipation of a story unfolding picture by picture, chapter by chapter. Books open doors to learning and to the world around us. Where do we go to find these awesome books? The library, 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…

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…

Reading habits play an active role in promoting students' reading skills and making them prepared to participate in modern society. Gender differences regarding students' habits in the use of reading medium, amount of time spent on leisure reading, and the frequency of school-related reading and of leisure reading were examined. The relation…

Richard Allington reviews the nature of the reading achievement gap between students from low-income and high-income families, concluding that the limited access to children's books experienced by children from low-income families lies at the base of the problem. The fact that children from low-income families lose reading achievement every summer…

The effect that online extensive reading (ER) of English texts has on learners' reading comprehension and motivation to read is not well understood. The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the efficacy of online ER by examining quantitative and mixed-methods studies that examined the effect of online ER on learners' reading…

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…

This study reviews the effect of comprehension and perceived text difficulty in promoting reading enjoyment and interest to read more among novice learners practicing extensive and pleasure reading. Sixty-seven college students in their first semester of Spanish were asked to read a children-like story picture book in Spanish and were then given…

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…

Nathanson, Pruslow, and Levitt (2008) found a high prevalence of aliteracy among inservice and preservice teachers. They determined that although teachers acknowledged the importance of personal reading, few invested the time to read for fun. They further noted that preservice teachers were motivated by literacy activities that had intrinsic value…