Generating Interest and Engagement in Adolescent
Readers
Kathleen B. Scales, Kelli M. Akers, Lisa M. Stout
Do we have to read today?!”
How many of us have heard our students utter those exact words after asking them to pull
out their reading materials? We might as well have been asking their permission to hook them up to
some sort of medieval torture device. As high school teachers, we are in a fierce competition for our
students’ attention. We must keep up with music players, computer and video games, the Internet,
movies, television, and a whole host of other interactive media devices created to capture the
attention of young adults. Students look at a book and wonder, where are the flashing graphics? In
addition to the impact technology might have on our students’ interest (or lack thereof) in reading,
students may not have positive reading role models at home or in the community. A National
Endowment for the Arts study, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (2004),
conducted a study of 17,000 Americans in 2002 found that little over half (56%) of those surveyed
had read any book in 2002, but out of those same people surveyed, 95.7% watched at