Reading motivation and reading habits of future teachers

Abstract

According to PISA 2009 results (OCDE, 2010), the Reading literacy of Spanish teenagers is under the international average, and reading motivation and reading habits are highly related to reading performance. And ass research reveals that teachers can be very important for the development of reading pleasure (Gambrell, 1996; Guthrie, 2008) specially if they are reading models (De Neaghel & Van Keer, 2013), the objective of this study is to explore reading habit and reading motivation in preservice teachers. To do so, it has been used a reading habit questionnaire for university students (Larrañaga & Yubero, 2005) and the reading motivation scale develop for PISA 2009 (OCDE, 2010) with 433 Education undergraduates of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Results confirm the significant association between reading habits and reading motivation. However, while a high proportion of the participants declare high or very high intrinsic reading motivation, very few are frequent readers. In addition, differences in reading motivation and reading habit depending on the course were not found. Implications of the discrepancies found between what future teachers say and do as readers are discussed.