In an era of smart-phones, tablets and online gaming, it seems that a young person's motivation to pick up a book and start to read is relatively low. The article explores this claim by investigating the reading habits of a class of 23 female students at a single sex school in the south-east of England. The case-study particularly focuses on the…

Some researchers have argued that low-achieving students may never acquire sufficient levels of academic vocabulary to be successful in school without some form of explicit vocabulary instruction (e.g. Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009). In this paper, I summarize the available data on the efficiency, in words learned per minute of instruction, of…

This article reports on a study investigating leisure reading among university students using Kindle devices. The study employed a pre-post reading engagement survey of a cohort of twenty-one college students. Students participated in the study by completing self-reported surveys before and after a semester-long reading engagement program. The…

Several researchers have advocated explicit instruction of vocabulary in order to help students improve their reading comprehension, especially low-achieving readers who need to "catch-up" to their age peers. Very few studies, however, have attempted to compare the time efficiency of direct instruction to its alternatives. In this…

This participatory action research study (Herr and Anderson, 2015) explored the reading lives, reading histories, reading identities and teaching practices of five in-service English teachers involved in a professional learning network (Trust, Krutka, and Carpenter, 2016) in order to deepen our understanding of the reading and teaching lives of…

This case study describes the creation of a leisure reading collection in the Clifford Whitworth library at the University of Salford. It briefly surveys existing literature on leisure reading collections and looks at the growing interest among U.K. academic libraries in recreational reading. It considers the reasons for promoting reading as a…

The following article is an adapted and abridged excerpt from The Language Immersion Life: A Guide for Families by Millie Park Mellgren (2017). This book features answers to the most common questions Dr. Mellgren was asked as an elementary immersion principal. The volume features commentary and data gleaned from surveys given to hundreds of former…

In this article, Jess Angell shows how her department seeks to make extracurricular activities accessible to all. There is a strong focus on involving professional historians, since so many students seem not to understand who historians are, or what they do. But the audience is wider than just history students: she shows how the whole school, as…

Surprisingly little has been written in school-related science education literature about reading for pleasure. This article reports the findings of a survey exploring free-choice science book reading habits of children and young teens. In the survey, over 300 children aged 8--14 completed a written questionnaire. The results showed that most did…

The most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policy makers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the…

In this article, the authors propose a model of four attitudinal profiles including both purpose (academic and recreational) and medium (print and digital): (1) recreational digital learning/print averse reluctant readers, (2) avid digital readers, (3) avid print readers, and (4) digital learning reluctant readers. We drew these four profiles of…

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between metacognitive awareness of reading strategies (MARS), and academic attainments (AA) of undergraduate business students. It also investigated the relationship between reading practices (RP) and MARS. There are three different categories of MARS -- global, problem solving, and support…

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has analyzed college common readings since 2010. The limitations of college common reading selections derive from their institutional frameworks. Non-academic mission statements steer selection committees away from intellectually challenging books toward those promoting progressive beliefs or activism;…

Readers' advisors are tasked with suggesting leisure reading materials to library patrons. The current discourse within the field has it that these advisors ought to adhere to (what I am calling) a "pure preference satisfaction model" wherein they aim to satisfy readers' existing preferences without judging or attempting to alter them.…

Nobody disagrees that reading is good for students' language development. The more they read texts that they can understand, the more confident and adept they become. However, it can be quite a struggle to get students started on their reading journey. We suggest that this is partly due to a lack of access to comprehensible and compelling reading…