The Relationship Between Positive Adole

The Relationship Between Positive Adolescent Attitudes
Toward Reading and Home Literary Environment

Kelly Partin
Bowling Green State
University
Cindy Gillespie
Hendricks
Bowling Green State
University

While factors known to positively affect attitudes toward reading have been investigated, the relationship between attitudes toward reading and home literary environments, particularlywith older students, needs to be more fully explored. This investigation focused on the nature of the relationship between high school students ' readingattitudes and the literary environment in which they were raised.

62 Reading Horizons, 2002, 43 (1)

THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT of adolescents is just as important and requires just as much attention as that of beginning readers. Yet local, state, and national debates over reading have focused primarily on beginners. Today 's adolescents live in a world that requires them to be more literate and to engage in more kinds of reading and writing than was required of their counterparts in previous generations. (IRA
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According to Vacca (1998), neglect of adolescents ' literary development manifested ". . .itself through educational policy, school curricula and a public

mindset on literacy that doesn 't appear to extend beyond learning to read and write in early childhood and elementary school" (p. 605). He added,
"Research funding for adolescent literacy... is minuscule in relation to the big bucks federal and state agencies spend on early literacy and early intervention research" (p. 605).

Research related to adolescent readers also falls short when compared to early readers. Research that does exist regarding adolescent readers tends to focus on cognitive factors associated with learning to read while affective factors related to reading are often overlooked
(Cramer & Castle, 1994). While knowledge of cognitive factors remains important in understanding the reading process,

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