1. Understand students’ reading interests and attitudes

To engage students in reading, we need to understand our students’ interest or lack of interest in reading, as well as their attitudes and difficulties when approaching reading tasks.

Gathering such information can help us know more about them (who is struggling, who is a reluctant reader, and who lacks motivation) and determine how best to encourage reading engagement.

There are various ways to uncover interest in and attitudes about reading.

Here are some suggestions:

–Reader’s interest inventory analysis

You can also use a reader’s inventory analysis where you address a set of questions to prompt student responses. To get more accurate information, include both the scale rating and affective check-offs. (Here is an example suggested by Grant et al.,2015,p.105-109)

-Thought-bubble pictures

You can use thought-bubble pictures to gauge students’ perceptions about reading (Zambo,2006). Using drawings and captions, students are encouraged to express what they’re thinking or feeling during the act of reading (Here is an example of thought-bubble pictures that you can use with both girls and boys)

So, these thought bubbles can contain negative or positive perceptions and emotions concerning reading. To ensure the reliability and validity of their interpretations, you can ask another observer to score the bubbles, using positive, neutral, and negative ratings (Zambo, 2006).

-Ongoing observations of readers

Observations can help learn about students’ strengths and instructional needs. While observing, name the literate behaviours and strategies your students experiment with and those they use successfully in reading.

2. Provide students with the necessary reading skills and reading strategies

Reading is not just the ability to decode symbols and comprehend what is read, but it also involves sustaining engagement and motivating students to read (Leipzig,2001).

We should, therefore, provide our students with reading skills and reading strategies that foster their cognitive responses: decode different texts regardless of their complexity, self-regulate, self-assess and read for purpose. We need to guide them to become self-engaged readers.

So, to achieve effective reading instruction, we must move beyond the traditional “assign and assess” method of reading to answer comprehension questions and, instead, demonstrate effective strategy use and provide multiple opportunities for reading and application (Allington,2012).

Equipping students with various reading skills and strategies will make them more engaged and interested in reading because it strengthens their ability to experience various reading tools.

To learn about the difference between reading skills and reading strategies and the most important engaging reading strategies read 8 Engaging Reading Comprehension Strategies

3. Explore various genres of reading

As teachers of reading, we need to provide students with opportunities to explore various genres of reading.

Connecting students to read through Internet resources, multimedia, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, informational texts and various forms of literature is essential. Because it can help pique their interest, meet their varied, individual needs, and accelerate their achievements.

This requires having an in-depth understanding of students’ reading abilities and interests, having access to a wide range of texts, and evaluating texts’ complexity.

Organizing the classroom library by genre can motivate students to read. We can also ask them to choose to read a different genre each month for independent reading or recommend books we think they’ll enjoy.

However, having different types of genres may not be enough, we also need to provide our students with lessons, activities, and resources to inspire and motivate them to explore them.

Therefore, it’d be better to ask students to respond to different genres and share their reflections with others.

4. Establish purposes for reading

Students need to have a purpose for reading to engage in reading in the classroom. A study conducted by Fisher and Frey (2012) found that when students are given essential questions that evoke critical thinking, they’re more likely to read for inquiry, which leads to reading with a purpose.

Purposeful reading can increase students’ interest and motivation to read because it makes the reading task more relevant to their learning.

Besides involving students in purposeful activities that promote strong academic and literacy experience is important to connect reading with real-life out-of-school and personal interests to inspire our students to think and evoke personal responses

To do so, we need to set the stage for reading by providing our students with the skills and strategies for purposeful reading based on authentic contexts. This can help them connect what they’re learning and reading to their lives.

For instance, introducing students to biographies or memoirs can help them learn about their community and the socio-cultural aspects of their lives.

So, besides making students aware of what is expected of them from reading, providing them with questions to answer before, while, and after reading can help keep them focused and engaged in reading. Click here to see an example of a checklist for reading purposes.

5. Help students feel more self-efficacious about their reading abilities

Students’ perceptions of their ability to read influence their reading experiences. Research found that students who perceive high self-efficacy in their reading abilities are more engaged than those students with low self-efficacy (Henk & Melnick, 1995).

So, students’ self-efficacy can influence the way they approach the text and their motivation to read.

It’s critical, therefore, to know how our students perceive themselves as readers to develop instruction and strategies that help engage struggling readers with more positive reading experiences.

To find out about our students’ self-perceptions of their reading ability, we can use The Reader Self-Perception Scale (RSPS, Henk & Melnick, 1995).

This scale aims to measure the student’s reading progress, his perception of his reading performance as compared with others, teachers, classmates, and family’s feedback about reading, and the internal feeling the student experiences during reading.

6. Develop literacy self-regulation

Self-regulated learning is an essential component of literacy instruction. Within the reading process, students are likely to encounter difficult words, complex sentence structures, unfamiliar topics, contexts, etc. They should thus strive to maintain a positive attitude, be flexible, and cope with their reading difficulties.

So, to engage our students in reading we need to help them develop the ability to persevere through challenging reading tasks (reading resiliency).

How?

Reading resiliency supports a love of reading. Having negative attitudes about reading, reluctant readers do not develop this habit.

Therefore, we need to act as facilitators of literacy supporting students to feel more positive about their reading experience.

Self-monitoring, checking, and giving constructive feedback can raise students’ self-esteem and make them confident that they can reach their goals.

Besides allowing for more opportunities for interaction and communication with students, we need to support students’ collaboration in small teams and pairs around literacy activities. Students in groups can be assigned reading tasks while each student is responsible for his own reading (He has to contribute to his group).

In addition, using buddy reading can foster positive attitudes toward reading, improve confidence, develop a love of books, and increase self-esteem.

In buddy reading, you pair different grade levels. Students can meet in a classroom, the library, or the cafeteria. They take turns reading aloud books of their own selection. Your modelling of the procedure and monitoring of the relationships in students’ pairs is important.

7. Motivate students to read

Another way to engage students in reading is to motivate them to read. I stress here the importance of intrinsic, instead of extrinsic motivation to read. Because when students find enjoyment, value, and authenticity in reading, they’ll develop a love of reading that goes beyond the classroom. So, they’ll read more often, for longer periods, and outside the classroom.

But, how can teachers motivate students to read more?

Providing students with personal choices of what to read is a powerful way to improve their reading motivation. Students can have various texts to choose from: song lyrics, book series, quotes, jokes, short stories, poems, letters, scripts, excerpts from a novel, etc.

Still, they need to justify the reasons for choosing this particular text. Teachers can help students in their choice of what to read. They can also devote some time for each student to read aloud to the class after preparing their performance. This reading-aloud activity cultivates civility toward classmates through audience preparation, fosters reading confidence, and provides a platform for social learning (Hurst, et al., 2011, p.442).

Another alternative for students’ reading aloud is allowing students to share what they read with others through book chats or turning a book into a reader’s theatre.

Classroom incentives can also motivate students. These can include, for instance, using a classroom reading chart and placing a check and recognition remark ‘Good Work’ for completing the book.

Finally, as an intrinsic reward, books are the best prizes to offer to students since they’ll be more likely to read them than if given candy or something else.

Engaging students in reading is a must to develop their literacy. These suggestions can help you foster a love of reading, improve your students’ comprehension and make them more engaged readers.

References
Allington, R.L.(2012). What really matters for struggling readers: Designing research-based programs. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Motivating boys to read Inquiry, modeling, and choice matter. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 55(7),587-596.

Grant, K.B., Golden, S.E., &Wilso, N.S.(2015). Literacy Assessment: Instructional Strategies.Sage Publication: USA.

Henk, W.A.,& Melnick, S.A.(1995). The reader self-perception scale (RSPS): A new tool for measuring how children feel about themselves as readers. The Reading Teacher, 48(6),470-482.
Hurst, B., Scales, K.B., Frecks, E.,&Lewis, K.(2011). Signing up for reading: Students read aloud to the class. The Reading Teacher,64(6),439-443.
Leipzig, D.H. (2001). What is reading? Reading Rockets. Retrieved from https://www.readingrockets.org/
Zambo,D.(2006). Using thought-bubble pictures to assess students’ feelings about reading. The Reading Teacher, 59(8), 789-802.