Developing motivated adolescent readers and enhancing student voice, using action research in disadvantaged contexts

This action research study, drawing on participatory frameworks, investigated whether a Year 10 English class (15–16-year-olds), including struggling readers, could develop their reading self-concept and ‘voice’. The research aimed to extend findings from a larger, mixed-method study, developing reading comprehension and motivation with younger adolescents, conducted in the south-east of England. Set in an urban state school in a deprived area, the present 12-week study aimed to explore, first, the impact on students of an evolving reading model, emphasizing motivation, extended reading, peer talk and use of metacognitive, multiple strategies. Second, it explored the effects of students engaging, loosely, as ‘co-researchers’, co-constructing knowledge with their teacher and reflecting on reading and pedagogy, in terms of ‘voice’ and agency. The primarily qualitative study combined open-response, student questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, written reflections on reading, and a teacher/researcher journal. Using the ‘constant comparative’ data-analysis method, the study found that students enhanced their reading self-concept, and developed their ‘voice’. However, unpredictably, reading confidence was threatened by students’ internalized discourses about performativity and feelings of anxiety and lack of agency, attributed to ‘high-stakes’ public examinations nearly two years away.