Reading is Fundamental, but Why Isn’t It Fun?
Wake up, Witty! You’re setting a bad example!
Each year of the twenty-five years I’ve taught freshman composition, my first classwide question has been How many of you read for pleasure? The answer is, on average, two of twenty, or ten percent of students, regardless of background. These are young adults who expect to earn college degrees, who just dropped $500 on textbooks they struggle to decode.
My follow-up, Why don’t you read?, is invariably met with It’s boring or I don’t get it, usually both, in that order. Coincidence? I think not. Remember when we thought the Sun revolved around the Earth, not the Earth around the Sun? We see because we have eyes, not we have eyes because seeing is adaptive? We fail to remember because we fail to rehearse, not we rehearse because we fail to remember? In these cases, we can thank Copernicus, Darwin, and Ebbinghaus, respectively, for correcting our very human habit of getting the cart before the horse–just as my non-reading students have been wont to do.
It’s not I don’t get reading because it’s boring, but It’s boring because I don’t get it. I don’t get cricket, so I find it boring (How can scores be fractions???). One might be forgiven for not watching cricket, at least in American culture, but for not reading in a world awash with text? Not reading in college? Don’t make me get all judgmental. (I promise to follow up with a post on why writing is undoubtedly humankind’s greatest and most powerful technology. I swear.)
Why don’t they get it? Maybe because getting it isn’t the point. Too many students, it seems, are indoctrinated into a kind of literacy cult demanding they read for theme, character, setting, and symbols–or worse, some prof’s pet ideology. What happened to beauty, insight, and awe? Sure, dissect a frog in biology, once, but don’t then assume the wonders of nature are forever hidden unless we eviscerate its denizens.
Students simply find the “getting it” mandate understandably overwhelming. According to a Zhang & Zhang (2024), “Higher cognitive load was linked to increased anxiety and reduced motivation during reading tasks.” What’s more, the actual difficulty of the text wasn’t necessarily relevant to students’ attitude toward reading: “Perceived difficulty was negatively associated with reading enjoyment and reading achievement.” If somebody told me my education in no small part depended on reporting my analysis of a cricket match, I would, I assure you, panic (What is a wicket? Why are they wearing Doric column thigh-highs?).
This is not to say that “getting it” at a basic level is not a problem. It very much is. I have met many a student who can read the words on the page but not understand what they compose. This is not unlike naming notes but failing to hear the melody. In a more scientific register, a major 2018 meta‑analysis (86 studies) found that many students have specific comprehension deficits despite adequate decoding. Their weaknesses lie in vocabulary, oral language, and syntactic understanding—not in reading itself. This is the classic “I can read the words but I don’t know what they mean” problem.
What happened? Many of these students say I used to read in middle school. So why did they stop?
According to a 2023–2024 review in Frontiers in Education, reading motivation declines from childhood to adolescence, reaching “an all‑time low,” and that this decline is strongly associated with difficulty, not disinterest. Kids don’t outgrow reading—they grow into texts that outstrip their skills, skills identified as follows:
insufficient background knowledge
weak vocabulary
difficulty integrating ideas
inability to track complex syntax
Students don’t hate reading—they hate not understanding. And when comprehension drops, motivation drops (Reading and Writing 2025). Harvard’s READS Lab research (2025) emphasizes that knowledge plays a critical role in reading comprehension. Content‑rich literacy programs significantly improve vocabulary, knowledge, and test scores.
The Reading League’s 2025 overview of adolescent literacy identifies two causes of reading disengagement worthy of their own bullets:
insufficient exposure to complex texts
lack of explicit instruction in comprehension strategies
It’s obvious: Adolescents face structural literacy gaps, not attitudinal ones. Put another way, reading motivation declines when texts become harder than the support provided.
And if all of this sounds familiar — if you know a student who used to read and now avoids it, who can decode but not follow, who’s smart but overwhelmed — the good news is that none of these are character flaws. These are skills, not destinies. With the right support, students rebuild confidence quickly; comprehension grows, motivation returns, and reading becomes less of a maze and more of a map. It doesn’t matter whether that support comes from a teacher, a mentor, or a tutor; what matters is simply that they don’t have to navigate reading challenges alone.
Sources
Harvard Graduate School of Education, READS Lab. (2025). Knowledge Matters: The role of content‑rich literacy instruction in adolescent reading development.
Shanahan, T. (2017). The complexity of text and why it matters. The Reading Teacher.
Spencer, M., Quinn, J. M., & Wagner, R. K. (2018). Specific reading comprehension disability: Major findings from a 2018 meta‑analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading.
The Reading League. (2025). Adolescent Literacy: A Research‑Based Overview.
Toste, J. R., et al. (2023). The decline of reading motivation from childhood to adolescence: A systematic review. Frontiers in Education.
Toste, J. R., et al. (2025). Reading comprehension and reading motivation across reader profiles: A latent profile analysis. Reading and Writing.
Zhang, H., & Zhang, J. (2024). The influence of perceived difficulty on reading enjoyment and achievement: A moderated mediation model. Reading and Writing.
Zhang, H., & Zhang, J. (2024). The relationship between cognitive load, anxiety, and motivation in reading comprehension among Chinese undergraduates. Reading and Writing.
