Reading Motivation and Engagement in Elementary Students

Reading opens students’ minds to new perspectives and understanding and gives them a way to connect with others’ thoughts and feelings. Reading is “a way to learn, explore and communicate with the world” (Ortileb, 2015, p. 166). However, many students are disengaged and uninterested in reading. Some students have a distorted image of themselves as readers, that is, they see themselves as poor readers or only readers of non-academic material. A review of the literature indicates that teachers can implement strategies in their classrooms to change these negative trends into positive ones. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to discover the strategies that teachers can use to create lifelong readers out of their students. This study will specifically look for strategies that promote, (1) student engagement with reading material, and (2) student motivation to read. This study addresses the following research question: What are effective teaching strategies for promoting lifelong reading in elementary students by increasing student engagement with reading material and student motivation to read? In order to collect data, reading instruction will be observed in three different elementary school classrooms in California. The observations will focus primarily on determining the teaching strategies for reading instruction that are used and effective with students. In addition, individual interviews will be held with six California elementary school teachers and two experts in the field of reading instruction, specifically university professors. The anticipated results will yield specific teaching strategies that classroom teachers use to promote student motivation and engagement and the challenges that teachers face in reading instruction and how they overcome them.