5) Joy
As critical as word recognition and language comprehension are, they are nearly eclipsed by a capacity far more difficult to teach and quantify—motivation and joy in reading. If you can cultivate the desire to pick up a good book and lose yourself in the pages, you have ensured a lifelong love of reading. • When children enjoy reading, they do it more often (Litwin & Pepin, 2020). • Students who read for pleasure (reading that is freely chosen) tend to have larger vocabularies, greater background knowledge, and higher reading test scores than their peers who do not (Allington, 2012; Cunningham & Stanovich, 2003; Hiebert & Reutzel, 2010; Sullivan & Brown, 2013; Wasik et al., 2016). This is because “joy feeds engagement and agency, which increases effort and practice” (Miller & Lesesne, 2022, p. 233). • According to Jeffrey Wilhelm (2014), pleasure reading is one of the largest predictors of academic achievement and economic outcomes over time, even after controlling for parental socioeconomic status and educational level (Guthrie et al., 2001; Kirsch et al., 2002; Sullivan & Brown 2013). • Pleasure reading increases brain function (Berns et al., 2013; Weinstein et al., 2021), educational engagement (Allington et al., 2010; Evans et al., 2010), enhances equity in communities that need it, builds resilience, and imbues young people with empathy and resilience (Cleaver, 2020). A love of reading also leads to better physical health (DeWalt, 2005; Weinstein et al., 2021) and a longer life expectancy (Bavishi et al., 2016). • Engagement—a driver of reading joy—fosters reading motivation and interest (Guthrie et al., 2012), and reading motivation predicts a large proportion of the variance in reading ability above and beyond academic and cognitive skills among Grades K–12 students (Guthrie et al., 2012; Ryan & Deci, 2002; Toste et al., 2020). • To promote student reading motivation, research suggests: • Exposing students to a diverse array of inclusive texts, including popular fiction, informative texts, and texts created to cultivate foundational reading skills (Hiebert, 2020). • Ensuring families and students have consistent access to books (Neuman & Celano, 2012). • Presenting students with authentic and relevant reading activities, offering meaningful choices to students, fostering students’ feelings of competence and self-efficacy, promoting relatedness, and strengthening student autonomy (Brandt et al., 2021; Gambrell, 2011; McRae & Guthrie, 2009; Ryan & Deci, 2017); • Encouraging students to choose high-interest texts that build upon their interests can also foster a value for reading (Guthrie et al., 2007). Students that self-select books are more motivated to read, expend more effort to read, and gain a better understanding of texts (Baye et al., 2019; Gallagher, 2009; Gambrell, 1996; Guthrie, 2000; 2008; Schiefele, 1991; Koskinen et al., 1995; Sewell, 2008; Pruzinsky, 2014; Tatum, 2009).
SCHOLASTIC LITERACY FRAMEWORK EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 14
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