How Can We Motivate Today’s Readers? By Bruce Howlett

As strong readers read, they enhance their reading skills. As they read more their enjoyment increases. They may choose to go on Facebook or play with their Xbox over reading, but that is natural. On the other hand, struggling readers rarely find reading pleasurable and often develop a sophisticated set of avoidance behaviors. While strong readers become better readers, struggling readers make minimal gains in reading and rarely develop a love of books. It’s no wonder that over a third of adult females and half of adult males rarely read for pleasure.

Traditional reading instruction is geared towards students who have average to excellent reading skills. Strong readers have very different motivational needs than those of struggling readers. Strong readers need some freedom from mandated reading, because they are intrinsically motivated to read. However, this is not to say that parents and teachers shouldn’t nudge solid readers to improve their reading choices and challenges because, Captain Underpants or Twilight may not win over students who would rather be playing with their Xbox or watching Gossip Girl.

What about struggling readers? Struggling readers need to develop a strong self-concept as a reader, so they should be free to pick their own reading material and allowed to focus on one genre or series of books. I didn’t start reading until third grade and rarely read anything longer than a picture-laden National Geographic article into my teens. My biggest recollection of reading was that it took too much attention and was anything but enjoyable. I rarely read books as a young adult, and when I did, I got very little out of it. I remember reading 1984 and being confused about the message. I could never keep all the characters straight in Michener’s Hawaii. In college, I had to read textbooks twice before I could pass a test.

The reason that people struggle with reading is because decoding printed words into meaningful spoken words is a very complex cognitive process. If you want to experience just how un-fun reading words is; read the following sentence from a biochemistry paper:

We have produced a monoclonal antibody against myelin basic protein that reacts with astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and Schwann cells. This antibody was generated by fusion of mouse myeloma cells with spleen cells from BALB/c mice immunized with delipidated white matter from adult rat corpus callosum. The antibody was characterized via solid-phase radioimmunoassay, immunoblot of SDS-PAGE, and by indirect immunofluorescence staining of monolayer cultures.

Having fun? How much effort did that take? Could you read material like this for 15 minutes?

Today neuroscientists offer brain scans of struggling readers that show us that even the slightest struggle with decoding or fluency takes all the fun out of reading. A struggling reader’s brain works three times as hard as a solid reader, and as the brain sucks in energy like a sponge, fatigue sets in after only ten or fifteen minutes of reading.

Even if someone is a good word reader, they still have one more major hurdle to overcome before they are going to enjoy reading – fluency. Researchers have found that an overwhelming number of unmotivated readers can’t read fluently for more than a few minutes. More than anything, fluency is the key to reading enjoyment. When reading is enjoyable, motivation becomes much less of an issue.

To summarize, students who struggle to read words accurately and with ease find reading anything but pleasurable. They don’t feel that they are successful readers. The most interesting research I’ve read recently says that children rarely learn from their mistakes and need an almost constant feeling of success to learn. Success is a huge factor in motivation. Even a few small mistakes can stifle learning while, a series of small successes and reading help leads to increased learning. The things we enjoy doing, from reading to talking, we do with high degrees of success. We avoid activities that provide us with even a little negative feedback. Therefore, word reading and fluency must become automatic in order for it to be an enjoyable activity.

At Sound Reading, we make sure that our students are overcoming the two biggest roadblocks to reading motivation – word reading accuracy and fluency. Our reading software for kids and adults often seems too easy, and it is! We want our students to feel successful and self-motivated. I know that this is why I do a lot more reading now than when I was a struggling reader.

Bruce Howlett