By Cory Turner, NPR

In his new book, Raising Kids Who Read, Daniel Willingham wants to be clear: There’s a big difference between teaching kids to read and teaching them to love reading.

And Willingham, a parent himself, doesn’t champion reading for the obvious reasons — not because research suggests that kids who read for pleasure do better in school and in life.

“The standard things you’ll hear about why kids should read I actually don’t think are very strong arguments,” he says. “Because if the goal is to become a good citizen or the goal is to make a lot of money, I can think of more direct ways to reach those goals than to read during your leisure time.”

Willingham wants his kids to love reading because, he says, “for me it’s a family value. It’s something that I love, something that I find important. I think I gain experiences I wouldn’t gain any other way by virtue of being a reader. And so naturally I want my children to experience that.”

The professor of psychology at the University of Virginia uses his new book to map out strategies for parents and teachers hoping to kindle that same passion for reading.

What are a few things we can do when kids are young to set them on a path to being passionate readers?

Before preschool, probably the most important thing you can do is to play games that help your child hear speech sounds: rhyming games, reading aloud books that have a lot of rhyme in them and other types of wordplay, like alliteration. That’s helpful.

Once they get that basic idea, you can get a little fancier. And these are the games that kids really love — where you play around with speech sounds.

If you had a child named Billy. You could say, ‘Daddy’s name is Cory. What if we took the first sound in Billy’s name, and my name is now Bory.’ That kind of stuff is comic gold for kids. I talk with a lot of kindergarten teachers who say it’s hard to get kids to stop doing stuff like that.

Banana-fana-fo-fana…

Exactly. You know, Dr. Seuss is full of that. Nursery rhymes are full of that. And it’s been known for a while that kids who grow up in homes where they are exposed to nursery rhymes learn to read more readily than other kids.

But how do you foster a love of reading in young children?

The most obvious is to be a model of someone who loves reading. One of the things I hit hard in this book is the idea of creating a sense in the child that this is what we value in our family. I think a lot of parents don’t appreciate what a powerful message that can be for kids — like the things that are on your wall, the rules you set in your household, who parents talk about as the people they respect.

You should model reading, make reading pleasurable, read aloud to your kid in situations that are warm and create positive associations. But also setting a tone where our family is one where we like to learn new things. We like to learn about the world, and a big part of that is reading. Developing a sense in the child that I am in a family of readers before the child can even read.

The second big piece I would recommend is you have to make reading the most appealing thing a child can do. It’s not enough that the child like reading. If they like reading but there’s something else available that they like more, they’re going to choose that. The easy way to start is to put books in places that your child would otherwise be bored. The most obvious one is in the car. Part of that is also making sure you’re not providing other types of ready entertainment at every moment.

My wife put a basket in our bathroom, full of kids magazines. My 6-year-old reads them voraciously, and now his 3-year-old brother copies him.

My 9-year-old is a very passionate reader, and I think her younger sister is too. But I think it’s in no small part that she grew up watching her older sister do this.

Do you think digital devices are a) keeping us from reading and b) keeping us from being able to focus?

There’s no evidence they’re keeping us from being able to focus. If you look at the way psychologists typically measure span of attention, there’s no evidence that it’s really declined in the last 50 years or so. The brain is plastic, but I think attention is so central to so much of what we do that it seems pretty improbable to me that attention span could shrink significantly. If it did, either we would all get really stupid or lots of other cognitive processes would have to adjust in some way.

I think there is something to what parents and teachers think they’re seeing. They feel like kids are more distractible than they were 10 years ago, and they blame digital devices. What all these digital devices have in common is they provide instant entertainment. And the entertainment they provide requires very little effort from me. It’s always available. There’s pretty much endless variety. So the consequence may be that span of attention hasn’t shrunk but rather what’s changed is our attitudes and beliefs. And our attitudes and beliefs are, ‘Bored is not a normal state of affairs. I really should never be bored.’

What’s your point of view when it comes to rewarding kids for reading?

Rewards have the real potential to backfire. You communicate to your child, ‘This is not something I expect you to do on your own.’ You pay people to do things that you think are unpleasant and that they wouldn’t do if you weren’t paying them. So, by paying your child for reading, you’re very clearly communicating to your child, ‘This is not something that I expect to be pleasurable for you.’

There is good empirical evidence that, when you pay people to do something, if you find the right reward they will do more of it. But once the reward stops, they will quite possibly do less of it. The reason being, they have a different attribution for why they were doing it in the first place. So the child who wasn’t paid looks back and says, ‘I’ve been reading this book because I’m the kind of kid who likes books.’ But if, instead, the attribution is, ‘I was reading this book because Dad paid me,’ now, if Dad is no longer paying him, he has no reason to read this book. That said, my recommendation is that a reward not be the first thing you try. But, if it is the only way to get a kid to read, then I would certainly consider it.

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The excerpt below is from the book “Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond,” by Larry Ferlazzo. This excerpt is from the chapter entitled “I Still Want to Know: How Can You Get Students More Interested in Reading and Writing?”

Let’s begin with a review of those essential qualities (needed to develop intrinsic motivation) in the context of reading and writing:

♦ Autonomy. A major Pew Research Center report (Lenhart et al., 2008) found that choice has an equally important role in teens feeling a desire to write (the story in Chapter 1 of my student who was energized by writing about football illustrates this point). Likewise, in reading, extensive research documents that teachers encouraging students to read books of their choice for pleasure is a major contribution towards students developing a positive attitude towards reading and a life-long interest in it (Leisure Reading Task Force, 20014, p. 2).

♦ Competence. A scene from the HBO series The Leftovers (http:// www.hbo.com/the-leftovers) succinctly explains why this quality is so important for intrinsic motivation. In it, two FBI agents were sitting in an office, and one told the other that his child wanted to quit soccer and wanted to know if he should let him do it. The other agent asked him, “Is he any good at it?” The first agent responded, “Nobody quits what they’re good at,” and much research backs him up (Tsioulcas, 2013; Yuhas, 2012). Providing scaffolding like writing frames and strategies/tools such as graphic organizers (student- or teacher-created) for responding to prompts (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 144) can assist students’ developing confidence as writers. The Progress Principle, which highlights that intrinsic motivation can be driven by people seeing meaningful progress in their work, was mentioned in the first chapter and in previous titles in this series (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 10). Creating structured opportunities for students to see their progress in reading and writing by comparing work (preferably emphasizing tools like “improvement rubrics” that focus more on what they have successfully done and less on their deficits [Ferlazzo, 2011, p. 79]) done at the beginning of the school year with accomplishments later in the year can also support student feelings of competence. In fact, at our school English folders are passed up through the grades and students can see and reflect on their progress over the years!

♦ Relatedness. The Pew Research Center found that teens say the most important factor for them to feel motivated to write is using it as a way to connect with, and receive feedback from, teachers, family members, and friends (Lenhart et al., 2008). Opportunities for students to discuss what they are reading with their teachers and with their peers in low-or-no-stakes environments has been found to promote a greater interest in reading (Leisure Reading Task Force, 2014, p. 4).

♦ The work is seen as interesting, and valuable for future goals. In other words, as mentioned in Chapter 1, students should see it as relevant to their present lives and/or hopes and dreams for the future.

Choice Equals Power: How to Motivate Students to Learn

Case Studies: How Teachers Use Tech to Support Learning

Can Character Be Taught?

Teachers Embrace Digital Learning Strategies

A slight “qualifier” should be attached to the second part of this last element— the one about it being seen as helpful to hopes and dreams for the future. As mentioned in Chapter 1, some researchers suggest that teachers explicitly pointing out how skills being taught in the classroom can be used in the future by students can be damaging to intrinsic motivation, particularly if they do not feel confident in their abilities or have little interest in the subject (Hulleman et al., 2010, p. 881). This issue is particularly relevant to a discussion on reading and writing since a significant percentage of students, particularly boys, often say that English is not a favorite subject (Wiggins, 2014) and multiple surveys have found that decreasing percentages of young people say they enjoy reading (Leisure Reading Task Force, 2014, p. 3). As a result of these negative attitudes, many of us teachers may tend to use a motivational strategy of emphasizing to students how important literacy will be to any of their future goals (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 147).

Is this a bad strategy? The slightly “qualified” answer is yes, no, and possibly maybe . . . Other researchers also suggest that we need to be particularly careful when we focus on relevance towards a student’s goals, though they also see potential benefits. Motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan call slightly different versions of it “regulation through identification” and “integrated regulation.” They believe the motive of wanting to do something less for the joy it brings and more for its instrumental value towards achieving a goal is a less harmful form of extrinsic motivation that—on a continuum—is as close as you can get to intrinsic motivation without being there (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 61). They also point out, however, that its promotion can still bring many benefits, including greater engagement and learning as well as increasing the potential that those tasks can be moved to the final step of intrinsically motivated, as long as the other three elements—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are present (Ryan & Deci, 2000, pp. 63, 65). Indeed, organizers of the 2012 international PISA test in 2012 found that, over the previous ten years, countries where students reported an increase in intrinsic motivation also reported an increase in students reporting this kind of instrumental motivation (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2012, p. 74).

So, what does this “qualifier” mean practically for our classroom practice? Is it a group of academicians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (What’s the historical origin, n.d.)? Or is it a meaningful nuance we should seriously consider?

I would suggest that teachers explicitly connecting what is being taught in school to student goals—by pointing it out themselves or by drawing it out of students (which, as Chapter 1 pointed out, appears to have less damaging potential)—can have a place in class, but also has to be kept in its place. In my experience, we will get fewer “Why are we learning this?” questions in learning environments that promote autonomy, competence, relatedness, or are connected to student interest. But when we do, I don’t see anything wrong in helping students make those connections to their personal and professional goals or periodically having teacher- initiated lessons with that focus, such as several in this book and in previous ones (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 147). On the other hand, constantly getting “Why are we learning this?” or “How are we going to use this?” questions might be an important indicator that we are not doing as good a job as we could be on implementing those other important conditions necessary for the development of intrinsic motivation.

Larry Ferlazzo is an award-winning teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He writes a popular education blog and a teacher advice column for Education Week Teacher. You can follow him on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.