Why reading for pleasure is one of education’s greatest untapped opportunities

As a child, I learned an important lesson from my mother about the power of reading for pleasure. She always told me reading was important, but far more powerful was what she consistently did. She read.

Whether it was technical manuals related to her work at the Department of Health, curriculum materials after she became a teacher, or the novels she enjoyed in the evenings, there was always a book nearby. Reading was simply part of life.

We made occasional trips to the local library, but we hardly needed to go every week. In our small study-room, books stretched from the floor to the ceiling and across shelves nearly five feet wide. I didn’t know it at the time, but this environment mattered greatly for my development as a reader.

Home literacy environment and student reading motivation

A child’s home literacy environment includes not only intentional activities such as reading together, but also the attitudes, habits, and behaviors surrounding reading that children observe. It includes access to books and other reading materials, conversations about reading, library experiences, family attitudes toward literacy, and the everyday opportunities children have to see reading as a normal part of life.

Recent studies have concluded that stimulating home reading environments are associated with a stronger desire to read, and that parents’ own enjoyment of reading may influence children indirectly through their reading motivation and eventual reading frequency (Claes et al., 2024; van Steensel & Jongerling, 2025). Clearly, my mother had created a powerful home literacy environment long before either of us would have called it one.

One of the first books my mom bought me was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I’d already seen the movie, and I remember thinking there was no way a book with almost no pictures could possibly be intriguing. I was wrong.

Somewhere between Captain Kirk trying to match Khan’s cunning and Mr. Spock’s final sacrifice, I stopped seeing words on a page and started living inside a story. I remember feeling the same emotions as the characters. I chuckled at Dr. McCoy’s humor, only to turn around and cry when Spock made the greatest sacrifice for Kirk and the entire crew.

Researchers have described this experience as absorption—the point at which reading becomes less about processing text and more about becoming mentally and emotionally immersed in the world of the story (Kuzmičová et al., 2022). In fact, several months later I read the book again. No teacher assigned it. There was no test waiting for me when I finished. I simply wanted to go back.

Researchers studying reading motivation distinguish this kind of involvement and enjoyment from externally driven reasons for reading, and evidence suggests that intrinsic reading motivation plays an important role in the development of reading competence (Rettig & Schiefele, 2023).

The power of intrinsic reading motivation for students

Not long afterward, another book quietly found me. It was an old hardcover collection on Greek mythology. The book itself was pale gray, lightly illustrated, and carried the unmistakable smell of pages that repeatedly became too wet and then too dry, thanks to the fan-regulated environment of our humid South Carolina home.

Between countless late nights and repeated readings, the binding eventually surrendered, and the integrity of the pages began to fail, one by one. Looking back, that poor book never stood a chance. I was in awe of the heroes and monsters alike. My favorite stories were the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth, Bellerophon defeating the Chimera while flying on the back of Pegasus, and the endless rivalries among the mighty gods of Olympus.

I’ve spent years wondering why I could disappear into those stories but often struggled to feel the same excitement for the required reading at school. One type of reading felt like an assignment. The other felt like an adventure.

Years later, a colleague smiled after hearing about my longtime fascination with Marvel. Yes, Ironman and Spider-Man have been my two favorites since the early 1980s. (This was long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made Ironman a household name.) To this day, I collect almost anything that brings on the nostalgia of what it felt like seeing these heroes come to life in cartoons and comics.

For a long time, I would hesitate to mention to another adult, outside of the comic fandom lifestyle, that I was an avid comic book reader. But my colleague immediately referred to my leisure reading in a way I had not heard it explained before. She said, ‘That’s reading for pleasure—what many educators also refer to as wide reading.”

Reading for pleasure: Strengthening vocabulary and comprehension

Reading for pleasure describes the voluntary reading students choose because they are curious, interested, or captivated by a story. Wide reading expands this idea by encouraging readers to explore broadly across genres, authors, formats, and topics. Rather than replacing rigorous classroom instruction, wide reading complements it by:

• Increasing reading volume
• Expanding vocabulary
• Strengthening background knowledge
• Helping students develop an identity as readers

Somewhere along that journey, students stop thinking, “I have to read,” and begin thinking, “I am a reader.” Yet for too many students, that transformation never fully occurs. Educators have long described the elementary years as a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. The phrase remains useful, but the reality is far more complicated.

Students do not suddenly finish learning how to read and begin using reading solely to acquire knowledge. Word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, language comprehension, motivation, and other processes continue developing together, even as the texts students encounter become increasingly complex (Duke & Cartwright, 2021).

This distinction becomes especially important for older struggling readers. As academic demands increase, so can the number of places where reading can break down. One student may continue to struggle with decoding, another with fluency, another with vocabulary or background knowledge, and still another with several of these demands at once.

Recent research suggests that reading comprehension difficulties are often better understood as combinations of strengths and weaknesses rather than one easily identifiable deficit (James et al., 2023). The tragedy is that students do not get to simply walk away when reading becomes cognitively exhausting. Reading remains the gateway to science, history, mathematics, literature, and nearly every other part of school.

Perhaps one of our greatest challenges, then, is not simply helping students read more difficult text. It is helping them maintain—or rediscover—the curiosity that made reading worth the effort in the first place.

There is also an important research-based nuance worth preserving: choice and pleasure are not substitutes for intervention. A seventh grader who cannot efficiently decode multisyllabic words still needs appropriate foundational instruction. But neither should intervention become that student’s entire reading identity. James et al. specifically caution that students with reading difficulties may require support addressing multiple strengths and weaknesses rather than assuming one universal cause.

This distinction between teaching students the skills they need and helping them see themselves as readers would stay with me for years.

Access to books, reading motivation, and student choice

When I joined the team at Flocabulary in 2018, I found myself returning to the same question that had followed me since childhood: What helps a student become a reader? The answer was bigger than decoding. It included vocabulary, curiosity, knowledge, and repeated exposure to language.

Every now and then, I wonder what might have happened if a program like myON had existed when I entered middle school. (myON is a personalized digital reading platform that provides students with instant access to thousands of books and news articles matched to their interests and reading level.) Imagine a library filled with mythology, adventure, science, comics, mystery, history, and humor, in multiple languages and with opportunities to browse and save books, revisit favorites, complete activities, and celebrate growth.

It would have felt almost like magic.

What resonates with me the most about myON is not the technology itself. It is the possibility that somewhere within the thousands of books is the one title capable of changing a child’s relationship with reading forever. That possibility becomes especially important as students get older. In a longitudinal study following more than 8,000 students from grades 5–8, Engler and Westphal (2024) found that intrinsic motivation to read declined across the secondary years, but that greater autonomy support from teachers helped slow that decline.

These findings reinforce something deceptively simple: as students grow older, opportunities for ownership, interest, and choice may become more—not less—important to sustaining the desire to read. That connection between choice and engagement is supported by experimental research as well. Fridkin and Hurry (2025) found that providing children with a sense of choice during a reading task increased their enjoyment of the activity and was associated with stronger comprehension.

Why pleasure reading is essential for reading proficiency

For the last two years, I have participated in Cobb County School District’s literacy celebration in the Atlanta area, where students write and perform original songs and poetry. This year’s theme of “Innovation” transformed research into creativity. Students learned about inventors, explored ideas, and then created something entirely their own.

Watching students perform those songs and poems reminded me that literacy was never meant to end with decoding. We teach students how to unlock words so that, eventually, those words can unlock something within them—knowledge, imagination, curiosity, voice, and the ability to create.

This is why reading for pleasure should never be dismissed as something extra that happens only after the “real” work of reading has been completed. In their recent critical review of the evidence, Cremin and Scholes (2024) found substantial research linking voluntary pleasure reading with:

• Reading achievement
• Comprehension
• Vocabulary
• General knowledge
• Other positive learning outcomes

They argue that reading for pleasure deserves a legitimate place alongside skills-based reading instruction rather than being treated as an optional reward once proficiency has been achieved.

That does not mean that finding the right book replaces good instruction or appropriate intervention. It means instruction should ultimately lead somewhere. We teach children the skills they need to read so that they can use those skills to discover, question, imagine, learn, and perhaps even fall in love with reading for themselves.

Looking back, I realize that little boy wasn’t searching for Greek mythology alone. He was searching for wonder. Star Trek gave it to him. Greek gods and monsters gave it to him. Comic books gave it to him. Every child deserves this opportunity to discover where reading might take them.

Perhaps that is one of education’s greatest untapped opportunities: not simply ensuring that every child can read, but also doing everything within our power to help every child discover a reason to want to.

The right book, in the right hands, at the right moment, may do far more than improve a reading score. It may change the trajectory of a student’s life.

References

Claes, R., Laga, J., Denies, K., Bleukx, N., Dockx, J., Van Keer, H., & Aesaert, K. (2024). The interplay between students’ home literacy environment, reading attitudes and comprehension: A serial mediation analysis using PIRLS 2021-data. Large-scale Assessments in Education, 12, 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-024-00233-8

Cremin, T., & Scholes, L. (2024). Reading for pleasure: Scrutinising the evidence base—Benefits, tensions and recommendations. Language and Education, 38(4), 537–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2024.2324948

Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the Simple View of Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

Engler, L., & Westphal, A. (2024). Teacher autonomy support counters declining trend in intrinsic reading motivation across secondary school. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 39, 4047–4065. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-024-00842-5

Fridkin, L., & Hurry, J. (2025). The effects of manipulating choice on children’s enjoyment and performance in a reading task. Current Psychology, 44, 6786–6797. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-025-07685-3

James, E., Thompson, P. A., Bowes, L., & Nation, K. (2023). Heterogeneity in children’s reading comprehension difficulties: A latent class approach. JCPP Advances, 3(4), e12177. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcv2.12177

Kuzmičová, A., Supa, M., & Nekola, M. (2022). Children’s perspectives on being absorbed when reading fiction: A Q methodology study. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 966820. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.966820

Rettig, A., & Schiefele, U. (2023). Relations between reading motivation and reading efficiency—Evidence from a longitudinal eye-tracking study. Reading Research Quarterly, 58(4), 685–709. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.502

van Steensel, R., & Jongerling, J. (2025). Parent support of reading motivation in primary and secondary education: Interaction effects with age and gender. Literacy Research and Instruction. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2025.2513239