Intrinsic, Contextual, and Variable: Exploring the Complexity of Adolescent Reading Motivation in an Urban Secondary “Reading School”

• In Event: Humanizing Literacy Research: Mapping Exchanges in Adolescent Reading and Writing Spaces

Abstract

Conventional wisdom tells us that motivated adolescent readers always enjoy reading, challenge themselves to access difficult texts, and perceive themselves to be good readers. In contrast, we might imagine that unmotivated adolescents rarely read, do not see themselves as readers, and cannot relate to texts. Because reading motivation is linked to achievement (Guthrie & Wigfield, 1999), it is an important construct both to cultivate and to investigate. But given observations of declining reading motivation among adolescents (Durik, Vida, & Eccles, 2006; Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998), perhaps our conventional perspectives of reading motivation have neither captured its complexity nor have intervened effectively to stem its decline. This study sought to better understand the complexity of reading motivation among youth in a single school context.

This study is grounded in sociocultural studies on literacy and identity (del Valle & Lewis, 2009; Moje & Luke, 2009) that provide an expanded view of reading motivation among adolescents. These studies shift our understanding from reading motivation as internally derived and stable to acknowledging that adolescents’ surrounding contexts shape their motivation to read. Sociocultural research, therefore, suggests that we need to understand more about how contexts that surround adolescent readers can diminish or promote adolescents’ motivation to read.

To better understand the complexity of reading motivation among adolescents in a single school context, I administered a reading motivation survey to over three hundred students in sixth to twelfth grades and interviewed a subsample of them at Grant Street Secondary School (a pseudonym), an urban middle and high school in the Northeast. This school is an ideal context for this study because of its demonstrated success in raising students’ reading achievement, and because students and staff regarded it as a “reading school” (Author 2, 2011).

Survey results indicated that Grant Street students possessed higher levels of reading motivation in comparison to samples reviewed in other studies. Interview findings suggest that three factors may have contributed to higher levels of reading motivation among the survey participants. First, Grant Street reading was a social activity that facilitated formal and informal opportunities to talk about what they read, in turn influencing their intentions around reading. Second, the school’s abundance of books that enabled students at once to see their realities reflected in the books they read, to peer into realities that were unfamiliar, and to empathize with characters’ experiences all motivated them to read. Third, students described motivation as a process; as such it changed over time, was dependent on their interest in the book they currently read, and sometimes regressed.

Grant Street students redefined reading motivation as an evolving context- and text-dependent construct rather than a fixed, internal trait. These findings suggest that many current labels for reading motivation are insufficient, and perhaps we must reconceptualize reading motivation as a construct that is constantly negotiated with one’s surrounding environment. Such changes in our understanding of reading motivation among adolescents may help us become better equipped to support them as readers.

Author

• Chantal Francois, Rutgers University