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Author 2: What do you think most teenagers think 
about reading?
Nicole: (pause) I don't know—there are just so many 
people who love to read. And there are so many 
people who don't like to read. 

Author 2: So think about the kids who love to read. 
How do they explain their opinion of loving to read?
Nicole: Um, they like usually don't talk about it or 
really, care about what other people think.

Author 2: So do these people that love to read talk 
about reading at all?
Nicole:  Yes they do. I have some friends like, 
Lindsay, Nora, Julie, Santina, who love to read a lot 
of books. And like usually after the CRCT [Criterion 
Referenced Competency Test] and stuff we were like 
the only thing we talked about was the books that we 
were reading. It was pretty fun.

Author 2: What did the people around you think of 
when they watched you talking about reading?
Nicole:  That we're bookworms and we're weird. 
(Laughs)

Author 2: (laughs) why would they think you are 
weird?
Nicole:  (laughs) because they don't like to read. But 
that's what makes them weird.

Author 2: Uh, how does what you see other people 
reading influence what you read?
Nicole:  If I see one of my friends who has a good 
book, I'll pick the book up and say "Hey, what's this 
book about?" And they will tell me what they've read 
so far. And I'll say, "When you're finished I would like 
to try it out."

Reading, Motivation, 
and the Power of 

Social Relationships: 
Learning from Middle 

School Students in 
a Title I Reading 

Classroom
by trevor thoMAs stewArt, ph.D.  

AnD eMiLy penDergrAss, ph.D.

abstract
Adolescent students’ social relationships have myriad 
influences on their lives. Therefore, it is important 
to ascertain how students’ social relationships can 
inform teachers’ efforts to create authentic learning 
experiences and increase student motivation to 
develop life-long reading habits. This paper examines 
middle school students’ perceptions of reading and the 
connections between social relationships and reading. 
drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with 
eighth grades students, this paper discusses the role 
of social relationships in students’ motivation to read. 
The authors explore the students’ perceptions and 
some share some insight into how social relationships 
might increase students’ motivation to read.



GeorGia Journal of readinG 26 Volume 38, number 1   2015

nicole (all names are pseudonyms) has recently 
become an enthusiastic reader. We believe that 
a significant part of her newfound enthusiasm for 
reading may be related to some of her friends’ 
positive perceptions of reading and the excitement 
that is generated by an enthusiastic recommendation 
for a book. Nicole’s experience is similar to one 
that so many of us have had so many times in the 
past: Excitedly waiting for a friend to finish a book, 
so we can borrow it—or not being able to wait and 
impulsively downloading a friend’s recommendation 
to an ereader. Talking with nicole encouraged us to 
explore the connections between social relationships 
and the reading habits of adolescent students who 
have been labeled struggling readers (because of their 
standardized tests scores) and placed in an eighth 
grade Title i reading class. This paper describes our 
work with eight students in a Title i reading class at 
Harmony middle School (pseudonym) in Georgia.

our Stance
We approached this inquiry and analysis from a 
social constructionist model (Charmaz, 2006), where 
learning is a dynamic interchange between students 
and teachers. our intent was to examine the ideals 
constructed by adolescents in a Georgia middle school 
to learn about their perceptions of themselves as 
readers. We believe that language and its usage are 
inherently social. This belief is grounded in the theories 
of mikhail bakhtin (1981), who argued that words are 
given their meaning by the “social atmosphere of the 
world” (p. 276). The words teachers and students 
use in classrooms every day are deeply influenced 
by social contexts (bakhtin). as people communicate 
with one another, the words they choose are colored 
by the contexts that surround them. for example, a 
student from the mountains of north Georgia is likely 
to conjure images of Jack’s River Falls when he or 
she hears the word river. in contrast, a student from 
Savannah is likely to image a slowly moving tidal river 
when asked to imagine a river scene. The influences 
of context and experience extend far beyond the level 
of individual words. a student who grew up walking the 
banks of Jack’s River hunting with her grandfather may 
be much more likely to be interested in reading a book 
like Where the Red Fern Grows (rawls, 1974) than a 
student who grew up in urban atlanta and has little to 
no experience hunting and fishing. There is little doubt 
that a skilled teacher can find ways to engage both of 
these imagined students in this text. However, careful 
attention to students’ cultural contexts, specifically their 
social relationships, can make it easier for teachers to 
position reading as a social experience. as ivey (1999) 
argued, students are significantly more motivated 
when reading tasks are connected to learning things 
that are important to them.   

exploring what motivates students to develop a 
love of learning and reading is not a new research 
topic in literacy studies (Guthrie et al., 1996; Klauda 
& Guthrie, 2014; Strommen & mates, 2004). it is, 
however, a topic that teachers and researchers 
must continue to explore as cultural contexts shift, 
technology advances, and curricular demands place 
increasing importance upon students’ abilities to 
read independently. Logan, Medford, and Smith’s 
(2011) study of the connections between intrinsic 
motivation and reading comprehension highlighted 
the importance of understanding the role of motivation 
in students’ abilities, particularly the abilities of 
struggling readers, to read proficiently and succeed on 
standardized reading comprehension tests. Clearly, 
the goal of reading instruction is to prepare students 
for more than success on high stakes tests, but the 
influences of these tests on classroom instruction and 
culture cannot be ignored.

as high stakes tests and standardized curricula 
continue to dominate instruction, too many middle 
and secondary english classrooms have become 
places where, for many students, reading is simply a 
formulaic endeavor akin to completing a scavenger 
hunt (Applebee, 1996; Author 1, 2012; Fecho & 
botzakis, 2007). Standardized instruction that ignores 
intrinsic motivation and individual difference does 
little to engage students and motivate them to learn 
for personal reasons (author 1, 2010). This does not 
have to be the case.

We argue that it is possible to engage students in 
effective, authentic instruction in the language arts 
classroom, which can still meet the ever-increasing 
demands of policy initiatives aimed at producing 
college and career-ready students like the Common 
Core Georgia Performance Standards (CCGPS). 
The CCGPS Text Complexity rubric (Georgia 
department of education, 2011) includes a focus on 
matching students and texts. as teachers navigate 
the complicated task of evaluating each aspect of text 
complexity (qualitative, quantitative, and read/task 
match), it can be helpful for to have specific areas 
of focus to consider. Students’ social relationships 
can be an excellent focus area in this process. our 
study was designed to explore the perceptions of 
reading held by middle school students who fit the 
“struggling reader” category, and develop insight into 
their experiences related to the influences of social 
relationships on reading and motivation in order to 
make recommendations for improving classroom 
instruction.

Context
Harmony middle School (pseudonym) is situated in 
a small town that is rapidly changing into an upscale 



GeorGia Journal of readinG 27 Volume 38, number 1   2015

Georgia metropolitan suburb. in the last ten years, the 
school has seen drastic changes in demographics—
shifting from a rural school with students from farming 
backgrounds to a semi-suburban school with an influx 
of upper middle class students moving into newly-
built million dollar homes. The student population at 
Harmony middle has become more diverse in recent 
years and the number of students receiving free or 
reduced lunch has declined.

Participants
We recruited participants from Author 2’s Eighth Grade 
Title i reading class. after hearing a brief description of 
the project, eight students elected to participate (with 
parental permission). The research project consisted 
of a series of three semi-structured interviews. for 
this project, we engaged in what maxwell (2005) calls 
“purposeful selection” (p. 89). first, we chose to recruit 
students from this class because their membership in 
this “remedial” reading class has given them the label 
“struggling readers” based on their academic histories 
and teacher recommendations. Second, the students 
in this class represented an interesting cross-section 
of the school population. There were both male and 
female students from varying social groups that 
represent a cross-section of the student population in 
the class. all participants are native english speakers, 
and they each have a school history of struggling with 
reading.

data Generation, and analytic approach
We utilized semi-structured interviews, which 
created opportunities for both the researchers and 
the participants to “jointly construct narrative and 
meaning” (riessman, 2008, p. 23). Since we engaged 
in dialogue with the participants, we must recognize 
that we are “an active presence in the text” that 
comprises the interview situation (riessman, p.105). 
Therefore, we argue that the interview process is 
“unavoidably collaborative” (Holstein & Gubrium, 
1995, p. 4). in our view, interviewing is a process that 
is influenced by the mutual shaping that occurs as 
knowledge is socially constructed through dialogue. 
each of the interview sessions we conducted relied on 
open-ended questions designed to draw the students 
into dialogue about their perceptions of reading, their 
perceptions of themselves as readers, and their social 
relationships.

We conducted our interviews with the goal of being 
attentive to each participant’s interpretations and 
experiences. Therefore, our approach to data 
analysis was largely concerned with identifying 
themes that illustrated the participants’ experiences 
and perceptions. in order to remain consistent with 
our social constructionist theoretical framework, we 
have chosen to situate our data analysis methods 

within Charmaz’s (2006) constructivist grounded 
theory and elements of phenomenological analysis 
(Laverty, 2003), specifically Kvale’s (1996) meaning 
interpretation. 

Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory provides a 
means of reducing data into manageable chunks. by 
reducing our data into chunks, we have been able to 
focus on tacit themes and issues in the data. Through 
the use of memos and theoretical sampling (Charmaz, 
2006), we interrogated the interrelationships between 
those explicit and implicit themes and issues. for 
example, as Author 1 was transcribing his first interview 
with Barney, he identified “topics of interest/ choice” as 
a possible category that might be significant. Through 
the process of writing memos related to this interview, 
author 1 was able to identify a category that had the 
potential to be weak. as Charmaz notes, “theoretical 
sampling [aided by memo writing] prompts you to 
predict [emphasis in original] where and how you can 
find needed data to fill gaps and to saturate categories” 
(p. 103). by sharing memos with each other during the 
data collection and initial analysis phases of the project, 
we were able to ensure that we asked questions in 
subsequent interviews with each of the participants 
that would help us explore the relationships between 
the categories. The follow-up questions we asked 
during later interviews with each participant allowed 
us to elicit more robust data. additionally, we read and 
reread the interview transcripts from each of the eight 
participants carefully to ensure that the themes and 
categories that we identified were present in the data 
generated through our conversations with all eight 
participants.

Blending Charmaz’s (2006) approach of data reduction 
with Kvale’s (1996) method of meaning interpretation 
allowed the data to be considered in multiple contexts. 
The themes and categories we identified during the 
coding process allowed us to dialogue with the implicit 
meanings we identified in the data that might have 
gone unnoticed. However, we needed a data analysis 
method that would allow us to ensure that we did not 
decontextualize the data by limiting our analysis of the 
data to a dialogue between themes and categories. 
bakhtin (1981) reminds us “each word tastes of the 
context and contexts in which it has lived its socially 
charged life; all words and forms are populated by 
intentions” (p. 293). meaning interpretation provided 
us with a method for ensuring that we attended to 
each of those contexts that influenced the meanings 
we constructed in the data.

We believe that the data we have selected to present 
in this article accurately represent the themes we 
generated in our analysis of the interviews with all 
eight students who participated in the study. in order 



GeorGia Journal of readinG 28 Volume 38, number 1   2015

to provide the richest possible descriptions of the 
participants’ and their perceptions and experiences in 
this article, we have chosen to present the data from 
four participants: barney, big ron, felicia, and nicole. 
in an effort to ensure that these students can be seen 
as unique individuals, instead of simply data points, 
we have constructed portraits of each of them using 
what we learned about them from the profiles they 
completed during the consent process, the ways they 
self-identified during the interviews, and the time we 
spent with them during the course of the school year 
in Author 2’s classroom.

Barney. barney is a 14-year-old athlete. He stays busy 
playing football, basketball, and baseball. He attends 
church every Sunday. one of his favorite things to do 
is to be outside playing whether in the woods with a 
.22 rifle or in the creeks with a four-wheeler.

Big ron. big ron is a 15-year-old gamer. He enjoys 
playing all kinds of computer games with his older 
brother and his friends. He is repeating the eighth 
grade and in contrast to Barney’s plaid shirts and 
jeans, big ron prefers to wear baggy, black jeans and 
spiky collars and bracelets.
 
felicia. felicia is a 14-year-old “country girl”. She 
would rather be outside doing anything then inside. 
She loves to squirrel hunt. She and her mom live with 
their extended family, as there are many cousins that 
love to spend time together.

Nicole. nicole is a 14-year-old “drama queen”. She is 
oftentimes wrapped up in the middle school drama of 
an adolescent girl’s life. She loves to read books that 
are full of excitement around dating, difficult choices, 
and gossip.

We have chosen to highlight these four students as 
they come from different social groups and each talk 
very specifically about how their social relationships 
affect their reading practices. While the data is 
consistent across all participants these four students 
are the most vocal about their social relationships and 
reading practices. 

discussion
Adolescence is the time in a child’s life when peer 
groups become one of the most significant elements 
in the construction of self-concept (allen et al., 2005; 
lease, musgrove, & axelrod, 2002; Wentzel, 1998). 
Franzak (2006) positioned reading as a socially 
situated activity instead of “a stand-alone practice” that 
occurs in isolation (p. 221). This idea dovetails nicely 
with Wentzel’s (1997) work, which found “significant 
relations” between students’ academic efforts and their 
social relationships with peers and teachers; students 

with friends and caring teachers tend to perform better 
in school.

the role of Social relationships
our work with nicole and her classmates represents 
an effort to learn more about individual students’ 
perceptions of reading and experiences related to 
the influences of social relationships on reading and 
motivation. our intent is to contribute to the development 
of authentic models of learning, which may increase 
opportunities for the development of curricula based 
on knowledge-in-action instead of knowledge-out-of-
context (Applebee, 1996). Essentially, we believe it is 
important to consider how students’ social contexts 
can inform the choices teachers make as they strive 
to foster a love of reading and learning in the english 
classroom.

our discussions with the participants demonstrated 
that social relationships can have both positive and 
negative influences on the reading habits of students 
who have been labeled struggling readers. if students 
engage in discussions of their interests, or participate 
in activities that involve their interests such as baseball 
game conversations, they are part of what Gee (2002) 
labeled an “affinity group” (p. 105). To be a part of 
an affinity group, one must share an “allegiance to, 
access to, and participation in specific practices” (p. 
105). many of these group discussions occur outside 
of classrooms, where students can observe, argue, 
and contribute in ways that are often not allowed in 
school. When teachers attend to students’ social 
relationships—or membership in affinity groups—
they can find ways to bring those relationships into 
dialogue with the curriculum by creating opportunities 
for discussion within these groups. These discussions 
can be face-to-face or virtual with social media 
facilitating them and contributing to the building of 
affinity groups. Instagram, for example, can be a 
useful tool to facilitate connections between students’ 
interests, social relationships, and skills included in 
the CCGPS. Teachers can create assignments where 
students might create profiles related to characters 
and use instagram to tag photos and create “a 
following” among the members of an affinity group. 
for a recent example of teacher at Pearl Cohn High 
School in Georgia who has integrated the practice of 
tapping into an online, affinity group related to John 
Green’s (2012) novel The Fault in our Stars, explore 
the hashtag “#firebirdsfeelalive” on Instagram. Felicia 
and nicole both shared a keen interest in Stephanie 
Meyer’s (2005) novel Twilight. Author 2 could have 
capitalized on this affinity group in her class to craft 
activities like this and help these students connect 
their interest in Twilight with curricular goals related 
to characterization. Throughout the interviews, these 
students routinely discussed the power their friends 



GeorGia Journal of readinG 29 Volume 38, number 1   2015

had in terms of piquing their interests in texts.

barney, a participant who is, by his own admission, 
disinterested in most types of reading, stated, “if 
they’re [his friends] reading a book and it’s something 
I’m interested in. Then, I want to read it. If they say it 
was a good book.” Barney’s friends can motivate him 
to read if the topic is of interest to him. bakhtin (1981) 
argued that each word lives “on the boundary between 
its own context and another, alien, context (p. 284). 
This concept can be connected with the boundaries 
between students’ social groups, individual interests, 
and the tasks required of students in schools. barney, 
who does not self-identify as a reader, was influenced 
by friends whose interest in reading certain texts 
helped him see that he could, indeed, find things to 
identify with and engage in within a text. Teachers can 
draw upon the knowledge they gain about students’ 
affinity groups to increase students’ motivation to 
read and help them generate positive perceptions of 
reading.

Big Ron also discussed the influence of social 
relationships on his perceptions of reading and his 
reading habits. When asked if his friends influenced 
his reading habits, he said, “sometimes. i just. They 
read way better than me an’ I just want to get up to 
their level.” for big ron, his peer group represented 
a positive image of reading—a reason to actually 
struggle, do the work, and improve his reading ability. 
again, we can see a student looking across a boundary 
and finding a bridge to that alien context. Big Ron and 
Barney helped us see Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of 
heteroglossia at work in their views of reading. as they 
engage in dialogue with their classmates, their words 
are always surrounded by a social atmosphere, which 
“makes the facets of the image sparkle” (p. 277). The 
choruses of voices that comprise their social circles 
influences their views of reading and motivate them to 
reimagine what it means to be a reader. if he can read 
the more complex texts he has been struggling with, 
he will have more in common with his peer group. 
Powerful motivation, indeed.

it would be irresponsible, however, to claim that 
social relationships represent a silver bullet that 
will solve the problem of motivating adolescents to 
read. barney serves as a powerful example of how 
social relationships can also have, at best, a neutral 
influence and, at worst, a negative influence on 
students’ motivation to read. In spite of his admission 
that his friends, sometimes, encourage him to read by 
their interest in a text, barney pointed out, “You have 
some people like right across the hallway [the gifted 
reading class] that would do anything to read. Then 
you got me and some of friends that would rather 
be doing something else besides reading.” Barney’s 

response indicates that some social groups value 
reading, which may have a positive influence on the 
reading habits of the members of that group. However, 
his response also indicates that if reading is not valued 
within a social group, the members of that group will 
seek out alternatives to reading whenever possible. it 
is important to remember that no instructional tool or 
strategy is perfect.

Despite Barney’s perceptions that some members of 
his class rarely value reading, it is clear that social or 
affinity groups where reading is valued exist outside 
of the gifted English class. Author 2’s discussion with 
Barney’s classmate Nicole demonstrates that within 
her social group reading is valued. in fact, nicole and 
her peers spend time talking about the books they 
are reading and that other groups probably consider 
them to be “bookworms.” nicole stated that her friends 
“who love to read a lot of books” would do just about 
anything to read and do not “care about what other 
what other people think.” Felicia’s decisions to read 
(or not read) books were also swayed by seeing what 
her friends were reading. She claimed that if her 
friends “can’t put it (a book) down, it is probably very 
interesting. So, I want to find out what happens”. This 
idea of watching others to find out what is being read 
is critical for struggling readers as they want to read 
and be seen reading what their friends are reading. 
Nicole’s response does correspond with Barney’s 
line of thought and reinforces the notion that peer 
groups can have power over students’ perceptions, 
habits, and reading choices regardless of the ability 
level of the members of those groups. Peers have 
the ability to persuade students and help them see 
things that they did not initially imagine were possible. 
Bakhtin (1981) argued that “when someone else’s 
ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us 
and acknowledge by us, entirely different possibilities 
open up (p. 345). our work with barney, felecia, big 
ron, and nicole demonstrates the possibilities that 
are present when members of students’ social groups 
share positive perceptions of texts.

implications for teaching
There are no easy answers to the question of how 
to help students who struggle with reading. This 
is a difficult task because individual children “are 
all different and they differ on myriad dimensions” 
(Compton-Lilly, 2008, p. 671). Students are complex 
beings whose lives and interests are constantly being 
influenced by their experiences. They are, in many 
ways, similar to words in that they are constantly being 
influenced by the context and contexts of their socially 
charged lives (bakhtin, 1981). While the experiences 
of felecia, barney, big ron, and nicole offer only a 
small view of the complexities of the influence of 
social relationships on students’ motivation to read, 



GeorGia Journal of readinG 30 Volume 38, number 1   2015

they do serve as clear reminders that relationships 
matter. The muSiC model of academic motivation 
(Jones, 2009) attends to the key role empowerment 
plays in engaging students in academic tasks. Jones 
highlighted the importance of providing opportunities 
for students to express and share their opinions. 
When students’ social relationships are viewed as 
instructional tools that can enhance learning, many 
possibilities exist for engaging students in authentic 
instruction.

Social networking tools like Goodreads (or 
biblionasium for middle school), instagram, and 
Twitter offer opportunities for teachers to empower 
students and make social relationships a central 
element of instruction. These tools are a natural 
way to make connections between the CCGPS 
and students’ social relationships. For example, 
CCGPS standard elaC8r10 requires students to 
read and comprehend various types of literature and 
elaC8rl2 asks students to provide a theme, follow 
its development, and provide an objective summary. 
both of these standards can be effectively addressed 
by capitalizing on the social aspect of reading. for 
instance, students can connect with plot, characters, 
and setting through the use of instagram. They can 
read a text like Where the red fern Grows (rawls, 
1974), take a picture, write a succinct summary, 
tag the photo with a hashtag, and then follow the 
development of the theme as it winds its through the 
plot by following the hashtag and/or friends’ posts. The 
key, then, is to make the dynamic nature of language 
and social relationships a central focus when thinking 
about how to address curricular demands in ways that 
will be responsive to students’ individual needs.

Coda 
as avid readers, the word reading often brings to 
mind an image of curling up alone with a good book. 
but reading—even for avid readers—is not simply a 
solitary activity. it is inherently social. We talk about 
our favorite books with colleagues, make connections 
between protagonists and people we have met on the 
streets, and give books as Christmas presents to our 
loved ones. it can, however, be easy to overlook the 
important role social connections play in our reading 
habits when we think about our roles reading teachers 
and teacher educators. The reading process is 
complex and myriad factors influence each person’s 
reading interests, habits, and abilities. With so many 
factors to attend to and the increasing demands on 
instructional time that accompany high-stakes testing, 
it’s important for us to slow down and take stock of the 
things that can help us engage students in the tasks 
of learning to read and developing a life-long love 
of reading. The CCGPS require reading teachers in 
Georgia to ensure students read a variety of literature, 

and social networks and affinity groups of all types can 
help teachers meet Georgia department of education 
mandates while also meeting what is, perhaps, the 
most important mandate—helping students find ways 
to fall in love with books. 

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Green, J. (2012). The fault in our stars. new York, nY: 

dutton books.

meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. new York, nY: little, brown, 
and Company.

rawls, W. (1974). Where the red fern grows. new 
York, nY: bantam books.

n empower members of the Gra and local 
councils to become effective leaders in 
the field of literacy.

n Provide quality reading education 
services to all Georgia educators.

n recognize exemplary individuals, local, 
and state literacy efforts.

n achieve maximum involvement of 
members at the local, state, and 
international levels to receive maximum 
benefits.

n Promote the goals and objectives of  
the international reading association  
of Georgia.

Georgia reading association

     GoalS


