Empowering aliterate adolescents to engage with personal reading

This study of adolescents with aliterate reading tendencies builds on Achievement Motivation Theory. It uses the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (Wigfield, Guthrie and McGough, 19 96) and the Title Recognition Test (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1990) as a foundation. Self-reported motivational, print frequency and summative reading achievement data were collected from 123 adolescents in a large inner city intermediate (11-13 year old) school in New Zealand. Results suggest that the motivational constructs originally designed by Wigfield and his colleagues for primary school children were also present in this group of adolescents. Moreover,distinctly different patterns of reading motivation seemed to exist for keen, poor and aliterate adolescents, as defined by their summative reading and Title Recognition Test scores. A succeeding intervention over six months explored the effect of teaching reading self-selection skills with the sample of students identified with aliterate tendencies. Significant improvements in the students‘ intrinsic motivations of reading curiosity and reading challenge occurred. In addition, the breadth of borrowed library genres and authors improved although the amount of borrowed library books fell. Further controlled studies are required in order to determine the unique effects of the intervention.