How Grade 1 Teachers Motivate Literate Activity by Their Students

Literacy instruction in 7 Grade 1 classrooms was observed with the goal of determining how the teachers motivated literate activity in their classrooms. Literacy engagement (i.e., proportion of time spent reading and writing) was much higher in 2 of the classes compared to the 5 others. There also were great individual differences between teachers in the number of behaviors that presumably might motivate literacy and the number of behaviors that presumably might undermine literacy engagement. Most striking, the teachers in the 2 classes with high engagement did much more than the other teachers to motivate literate behaviors; they also did little that potentially could undermine literacy engagement relative to the other 5 teachers. That is, in the 2 most engaged classes, instruction was saturated with teaching that potentially could motivate literacy behaviors, prompting the hypothesis that teaching that produces literacy engagement in first graders should be massively motivational.