Reading engagement article review - Research Paper Example

The first article is titled Seven Rules of Engagement: What’s Most Important to Know about Motivation to Read by Linda B. Gambrell. In the article’s introduction, Gambrell argues against the relevance of instruction whose purpose is to provide students with decoding strategies and comprehension skills. She gives substance to her argument by citing a study carried out by the OECD in 2010 under the Program for International Student Assessment, which established that students with a high interest in reading recorded much better performance than children with little interest in reading (Gambrell, 2011).

Gambrell simply corroborates what many teachers have already observed in their classrooms, that below grade level and struggling readers usually have little interest in reading activities due to lack of reading motivation. Gambrell, a professor of education at Clemson University in South Carolina, bases her article on research-based sources. She combines credible findings from studies carried out by institutions and organizations such as the International Reading Association, to research conducted by individual scholars, including those she carried out in collaboration with other researchers.

For example, Essential Reading in Motivation, by Gambrell, Marinak, and Malloy provided the author with deep insights regarding the value of motivation in reading and literacy proficiency. The author goes a step further than most other authors have done when writing about the subject of reading motivation. She not only outlines evidence backing the importance of stimulating student motivation for reading in the classroom, but also provides simple strategies which teachers can use to help boost their students’ reading motivation.

As a teacher with classroom experience, I recognize that there are numerous challenges marring the process of stimulating intrinsic motivation among disengaged readers. Teachers mostly learn methods of stimulating reading motivation through interaction with more experienced colleagues. However, they bear knowledge regarding only a handful of methods, of which they are not fully conversant (Guthrie, Wigfield & Von Secker, 2000). Therefore, Gambrell has lessened the burden teachers bear in this respect by outlining seven clearly explained evidence-based rules of boosting student reading engagement.

Moreover, Gambrell, provides useful classroom tips of maximizing each of the seven rules of engagement (Gambrell, 2011). The second article that I selected which has high relevance to my case study topic is titled Putting the Fun Back into Fluency Instruction by Mary Ann Cahill and Ann E. Gregory. This article focuses on the value and strategies of using fun activities to enable lower grade students master fluency while reading. The article is not research-based, but derives content from observation of another teacher’s fluency teaching methods during a classroom session.

However, the authors cite extensively from previous research in order to corroborate the methods applied by Mrs. Victoria in her class (Cahill & Gregory, 2011). I chose this article after noting that Mrs. Victoria’s method of stimulating reading fluency has a high potential for success for a number of reasons. Firstly, she takes time at the beginning of the process to ensure that her students gain a solid understanding of the true meaning of fluency. Mrs. Victoria recognized that merely