Boerma, Inouk.indd

CHAPTER 1 8 In our society, where print is omnipresent and extremely important as a means of communication, possessing sufficient reading skills is crucial for participation. It has been shown that children who engage in more leisure time reading are generally better readers (e. An important reason that determines whether children do or do not engage in leisure time reading is reading enjoyment. Children who enjoy reading choose to read more during leisure time, therefore they practice their reading skills more and this results in better reading performance, which will contribute to their reading enjoyment. In other words, they enter a positive reading spiral. This process has been referred to as the process of reciprocal causation (Mol & Bus, 2011; Stanovich, 1986). However, the opposite is also true, when children do not enjoy reading, they do not read much and enter a negative reading spiral, which negatively affects their reading performance. This means that the gap in reading skills between children who do and who do not enjoy reading can easily increase. A large international comparative study has shown that only 28% of the fourth graders enjoys reading, whereas 15% does not enjoy reading at all (Mullis et al., 2012). For the Netherlands, these numbers are even more dramatic: only 20% reported to enjoy reading, while 27% does not enjoy reading, which ranks the Netherlands at the bottom four countries internationally (Meelissen et al., 2012). This has direct consequences for reading performance, as reading for enjoyment has subsequently been found to be related to reading comprehension scores, Children's reading enjoyment generally declines as children get to the higher grades of primary school It is thought that this decline is related to a shift from " learning to read " to " reading to learn " which puts more demands on children's reading skills as a means of acquiring information. The main aim of this thesis is to examine different factors that are related to children's reading enjoyment and reading comprehension, in the context of both their home and their school environment: so-called " determinants ". We focus on children from Grade 3 to 6 (age 7-13), because children in the upper 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9 grades of primary school are expected to have passed the early stages of reading development and now should be " reading to learn ". Whereas younger children mostly depend on their parents who have to …