Young Children's Motivation to Read and Write: Development in Social Contexts

Abstract

In a 3-year longitudinal, mixed-method study, 67 children in two schools were observed during literacy activities in Grades 1–3. Children and their teachers were interviewed each year about the children's motivation to read and write. Taking a grounded theory approach, content analysis of the child interview protocols identified the motivations that were salient to children at each grade level in each domain, looking for patterns by grade and school. Analysis of field notes, teacher interviews, and child interviews suggests that children's motivation for literacy is best understood in terms of development in specific contexts. Development in literacy skill and teachers' methods of instruction and raising motivation provided affordances and constraints for literate activity and its accompanying motivations. In particular, there was support for both the developmental hypotheses of Renninger and her colleagues (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) and of Pressick-Kilborne and Walker (2002). The positions of poor readers and the strategies they used were negotiated and developed in response to the social meanings of reading, writing, and relative literacy skill co-constructed by students and teachers in each classroom. The relationship of these findings to theories of motivation is discussed.

Notes

¹ Walker and Pressick-Kilborn (2002) argue that both situational and individual interests are socially constructed and thus both are situational to some extent.

²There were 14 categories of motivation identified by Guthrie et al. (1996); however, the last, “reading efficacy,” was not a motivation but a self-perception.

³This question was added in Year 2, arising from classroom observations of student behavior.

⁴Teachers from these schools and two others participated in the kindergarten year study (Nolen, 2001); sampling in that study aimed to maximize the differences between the teachers and students in different classrooms.

⁵The first grade teachers recruited for the current study received students taught by two of the participating kindergarten teachers.

⁶Although Ms. Curtis's and Ms. Evans's students (n = 6) participated in the interviews each year, their teachers did not consent to an interview. Some observations were completed in Ms. Curtis's room (when students were in second grade).

⁷Target children had scored in the bottom quartile of national norms in phonemic awareness in kindergarten. Two target children who entered the study at Grade 2 were identified by their teacher as struggling readers.

⁸“Reading minutes”: Children kept track of how many minutes they read at home, and charted these in their homework notebooks. “Book-It” was an extrinsic reward program sponsored by a corporation in which students set goals for the number of books read each month. They wrote a book report on each book, and the class received points toward a pizza party each month for each student who met his or her goal.