Listening to the Voices of Boys

Exploring the Motivation of Primary Boys to Engage in Reading

By:
Krista Griffin, Metropolitan State University of Denver

A volume in the series: Literacy, Language and Learning. Editor(s): Claudia Finkbeiner, Universitaet Kassel. Wen Ma, Le Moyne College.

Published 2016

Motivation to engage in reading is a consistent problem for students in general and boys in particular. To solve this problem, we often seek answers from everyone but those we are hoping to motivate. We read the latest article on motivation and think we have finally come up with the recipe that will motivate all of the boys in our class. When it doesn’t work for everyone, we go back to the drawing board and try something else until we finally understand that all boys are motivated by different things.

That is the basis of this book: nothing will work for ALL boys, but there are ways to equip teachers to find out how the boys in their classes are motivated. It provides them with a direction to go once they’ve established the needs of their students and offers suggestions for how to meet individual motivational needs. Each chapter addresses a different motivational need, providing background information and practical classroom applications.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I: Introduction. CHAPTER II: The Importance of Asking. CHAPTER III: You've Asked Them: Now What? CHAPTER IV: Helping Boys See Reading as a Masculine Activity. CHAPTER V: Helping Boys Understand the Purpose of Reading. CHAPTER VI: Helping Boys to Develop Self Efficacy with Reading. CHAPTER VII: What Counts as Reading? CHAPTER VIII: Responding to Reading. CHAPTER IX: Creating and Maintaining an Optimal Classroom Environment that Helps All Learners Perform Their Best. CHAPTER X: Helping Boys Understand How to Select Texts. CHAPTER XI: Motivating Emergent Bilinguals. CHAPTER XII: Conclusion.