In short
- Pupils who read more tend to read better, so judge any motivation scheme by whether it raises the amount pupils read.
- Interest, choice and feeling capable predict reading more strongly than rewards, grades or the wish to beat others.
- Competition and rewards help when they point at reading itself, and when the contest is fair, team-based and frequent enough to survive a bad day.
- The research on reading motivation is strong and the research on leaderboards and gamification is mixed, so check whether pupils still read when the competition stops.
Every English department has tried something to get pupils reading: a challenge, a chart, a prize, a competition. Some of it works for a few weeks. This guide asks what moves pupils to read, and what a competition can and cannot add. It draws on research in reading motivation, habit formation, rewards and competition, and it says plainly where that research is thin.
The guide follows one argument. The amount pupils read is what matters, so motivation is a means to it. Wanting to read does more than being paid to read. Competition and rewards can help if they are designed around reading itself. And the real test comes after the competition ends. Each section links to shorter articles that go deeper.
What moves pupils to read?
Start with why the amount matters. Anderson, Wilson and Fielding (1988) asked 155 fifth-grade pupils in the United States to log their out-of-school activities every day for 8 to 26 weeks. Among all the activities recorded, reading books was the best predictor of reading achievement. It also predicted gains in achievement between second and fifth grade. On most days, most of the children did little or no book reading.
That study shows a link and not a proven cause, and the children were reading in their first language. But it sets the target. A motivation scheme succeeds if pupils read more, and keep reading.
What predicts how much pupils read? Wigfield and Guthrie (1997) gave a reading motivation questionnaire to 105 fourth- and fifth-grade pupils twice in a school year. Motivation predicted the amount and breadth of their reading, even after allowing for how much they had read before. Intrinsic motivation predicted reading more strongly than extrinsic motivation did. Intrinsic motives include curiosity and getting absorbed in a story. Extrinsic motives include recognition and grades.
Schiefele, Schaffner, Möller and Wigfield (2012) reviewed twenty years of research and reached a similar conclusion. Intrinsic reading motivation made a positive contribution to reading behaviour and reading competence. Extrinsic motivation made a relatively small or negative one. The review names seven dimensions of reading motivation: curiosity, involvement, competition, recognition, grades, compliance and work avoidance. Competition is on the list. It is a real motive for reading, and it sits on the extrinsic side.
The same review adds a caution. Whether motivation causes better reading, and whether it works through more reading, is still largely unresolved. The studies show what goes together. They do not settle what causes what.
Guthrie and Wigfield (2000) describe engaged reading as motivated, strategic, driven by knowledge and socially interactive. They write that a reader who is intrinsically motivated, and who believes she is capable, will persist with difficult texts. That gives a school three levers:
- Interest. Stories pupils want to finish.
- Choice. Some say over what, when or where they read.
- Feeling capable. Texts the pupil can read without help, and early success.
Does this hold in a foreign language? Takase (2007) studied 219 female Japanese high school students through a year of extensive reading in English. The two strongest influences on their reading were intrinsic motivation for reading in their first language and for reading in English. Interviews showed that some keen readers of Japanese were not motivated to read English. The gap between what they could read in each language was too wide. Level decides whether interest survives. The Benefits of Reading for Pleasure: Does It Beat Drills? looks at the reading side of this.
Rewards and competition are extrinsic tools. The rest of this guide is about using them so that they serve interest, choice and capability, and do not replace them.
The daily run: making reading a daily habit
Motivation rises and falls. A habit carries pupils through the days when it is low. Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle (2010) followed adult volunteers who each tried to form one new daily habit, done after the same cue each day. The median time to reach a plateau of automaticity was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 days. Missing a single day did not materially affect the process.
Three things follow for a school. Reading needs a fixed cue, such as the register or the end of lunch. The daily task has to be small enough for a bad day. And the plan has to last a term, not a fortnight. The volunteers were adults forming eating, drinking and exercise habits, so treat the numbers as a rough guide for pupils.
A streak, a count of days in a row, makes the habit visible and gives pupils a reason to come back. It also carries a risk: a broken streak can make a pupil give up. How to Build a Daily Reading Streak in Your School covers the research on streaks, a routine you can run, and the rule for missed days.
A daily event also changes what a competition feels like. When there is a new round every day, yesterday's bad result is already old. That is the idea of a daily run: the same short reading task for everyone, every day, with a fresh chance to score each morning. No study we found tests this format directly. The case for it rests on the habit research above.
Classroom example (an illustration, not a study)
Cue: the morning register.
Task: ten minutes of reading, one short story at the pupil's own level.
Record: each pupil logs the story, and the class total goes on the board.
Missed day: a pupil can catch up within three school days.
Daily reading also helps memory for words, because pupils meet them again at short intervals. Does Reading Every Day Help Students Keep New Words? covers that side.
Competing across schools
A competition between schools puts the school, not the pupil, on the scoreboard. Pupils read for a shared total, and the rival is a school they may never meet. Whether that raises reading is not something we can cite a study for. We found no controlled trial of reading competitions between schools.
What research does offer is a warning about competition in general. Murayama and Elliot (2012) combined the available studies and found no noteworthy overall relation between competition and performance. Their explanation is that competition sets off two opposite processes. Some people respond by trying to outdo others, which helps performance. Others respond by trying not to do worse than others, which harms it.
A contest between schools can be designed to lean towards the helpful side. The result is shared, so no single pupil is exposed. The score is a school total, so every pupil's reading adds to it. And if standings update often, a poor week is soon behind you. Why Inter-School Competition Gets Students Reading Daily sets out the case, including what to watch for.
The practical side is harder than it looks. Schools need the same texts, the same scoring and a results page that all of them trust. How to Run a Reading Competition Between Schools goes through shared content, school-level scoring and handling disputes.
Protect individual pupils in any public table. Publish school-level results only. A pupil's own numbers are for the pupil and the teacher.
Guides on this
Competing within your school
Inside one school, the teams are houses, classes or year groups. The design rule is the same, and it is easier to apply. Pupils cooperate inside a team, and teams compete with each other. The score must depend on every member, so that a team can only win by getting all its pupils reading.
House Reading Competitions: Running One Inside Your School gives a step-by-step plan. It also reports the research on cooperation and competition behind the rule. One decision shapes everything else: what you count.
| What is counted | What it rewards | Main risk |
|---|---|---|
| Pages read | Speed, and books with little text on a page | Hard to check, and weaker readers cannot keep up |
| Books finished | Short books | Long books are punished |
| Minutes read | Time spent with a text | Minutes at home are self-reported |
| Stories finished at the pupil's own level | Completing a text that fits the reader | Rushing, unless there is a short check |
| Share of the team that read | Bringing everyone along | Says little about how much each pupil read |
A competition is an event. It needs a start, an end and a fresh start, or pupils tire of it. School Reading Challenge Ideas and How to Run Them covers visible progress, simple rules and the length of a season.
An event works better in a school where reading is already normal. Reading is seen in corridors and assemblies, and teachers of every subject talk about what they read. How to Build a Reading Culture Across Your School describes how to get there over a year or more.
Guides on this
Fair, level-matched competition
A competition is fair when every pupil and every team has a real chance of scoring. In reading, that depends on level. Set a class of A2 readers against a class of B2 readers on the same text, and the A2 class will lose however hard it tries.
Fairness is also a motivation question. Feeling capable is one of the three levers from the first section. Takase (2007) found keen readers who were not motivated to read English, because it was too far from what they could read in Japanese. A contest that a pupil cannot win may teach the pupil that effort is pointless.
Two kinds of matching help:
- Match the text to the reader. Each pupil reads at their own level. A finished A1 story earns what a finished B1 story earns.
- Match the rivals. Teams or schools compete against others at a similar level. The CEFR gives a common scale for this.
There is a trade-off. If every pupil reads a different text, scores are harder to compare. If everyone reads the same text, some will find it too hard. Matching rivals by level lets a whole group share one text that suits it.
Fair Reading Competitions: Why Level Matching Matters goes further into this. To place pupils in the first place, see How to Assess a Student's English Reading Level.
We know of no study that compares level-matched and unmatched reading competitions directly. The case rests on the wider evidence that feeling capable supports reading.
Trophies, certificates and rewards
Rewards are the most used motivation tool in schools and the most argued about. The best evidence is a meta-analysis of 128 experiments by Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999). Tangible rewards given for doing, finishing or doing well at a task lowered later free-choice interest in it. So did expected rewards in general. Positive feedback raised both free-choice behaviour and reported interest. Tangible rewards tended to be more harmful for children than for college students.
That does not mean a school should never give a certificate. The experiments measured what happens to interest that is already there. Many pupils do not yet enjoy reading in English, and a reward may get them started. The risk is greatest where the reward becomes the reason for reading.
| Reward | Example | What the evidence suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Positive feedback | Telling a pupil what they did well as a reader | Raised interest in Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) |
| Tangible prize, promised in advance | A voucher for reading ten books | Lowered later free-choice interest in the same meta-analysis |
| Badges and leaderboards | Points, ranks and badges added to a course | Mixed: compare Sailer and Homner (2020) with Hanus and Fox (2015) |
| Certificates and trophies | A certificate for a term of reading | Not tested directly in the studies cited here |
Gamification means adding game elements, such as points, badges and leaderboards, to learning. Sailer and Homner (2020) combined the experimental studies in a meta-analysis. They found small positive effects on learning, on motivation and on behaviour. Only the effect on learning stayed stable when they looked at the most rigorous studies. Combining competition with collaboration was particularly effective for behavioural outcomes. The authors add that the factors behind successful gamification are still somewhat unresolved.
Single studies can point the other way. Hanus and Fox (2015) followed students in two university courses over a 16-week semester. One course had a leaderboard and badges. The other had the same content without them. Students in the gamified course showed less motivation and satisfaction over time, and scored lower on the final exam. It was one study of adults, but it shows that badges and leaderboards can backfire.
So the evidence on leaderboards and badges in classrooms is mixed. Gamification in the Language Classroom: What Works looks at which elements to use. Reading Rewards, Badges and Streaks: Which Ones Motivate? covers reward design. Do Reading Certificates Motivate Students? looks at certificates on their own.
A working rule: reward the reading, not the rank. Recognise stories finished, levels reached and words learned. Give feedback that tells pupils they are becoming capable readers.
Guides on this
Reaching every reader
Every scheme in this guide is easiest to run with pupils who already read a little. The pupils who most need to read more are often the ones a competition leaves behind. Plan for them first.
Reluctance usually has a cause. The text is too hard, the topics are dull, or the pupil has failed at reading before and expects to fail again. Each cause has a different answer: an easier level, a wider choice, or a run of small successes. Strategies for Reluctant Readers in English starts from a short diagnostic conversation. Extensive Reading for Reluctant & Struggling Readers covers the reading program itself.
Age matters too. Most of the participants in the studies cited here were children aged about 9 to 11, or adults. Evidence on teenagers reading in a foreign language is thinner. Takase (2007) is one study of that group, and its participants were all girls in one country. Motivating Teenagers vs Young Learners to Read sets out what tends to change with age, including the growing weight of choice and of peers.
In a competition, three design choices protect weaker and reluctant readers:
- Score participation or improvement. A pupil's first finished story then counts for the team.
- Keep individual results private. Show team totals in public.
- Let pupils read at their own level. A pupil who can finish the text can take part.
Guides on this
How strong is the evidence?
Not all of the claims in this guide rest on the same ground. The table sets out how far each one can be trusted for pupils aged 8 to 16 who are learning English.
| Claim | Main sources | How far to trust it |
|---|---|---|
| Pupils who read more read better | Anderson, Wilson and Fielding (1988) | A clear link in first-language readers. Cause is not proven. |
| Intrinsic motivation predicts reading more than extrinsic | Wigfield and Guthrie (1997); Schiefele and colleagues (2012); Takase (2007) | Consistent across studies, including one in a foreign language. |
| Expected tangible rewards can lower interest | Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) | Strong in experiments. Not tested on school reading schemes. |
| Competition raises performance | Murayama and Elliot (2012) | No overall effect. It depends on the design. |
| Badges and leaderboards help | Sailer and Homner (2020); Hanus and Fox (2015) | Mixed. |
| A daily habit takes weeks to form | Lally and colleagues (2010) | One study of adults. Indirect for pupils and reading. |
In short, the research on reading motivation is strong, and the research on competition formats is thin. Treat any competition as a trial, and measure what it does in your own school.
Putting it together in a school week
Here is one way to fit these ideas into a normal week. It is an example, not a prescription. Adjust it to your timetable and your pupils' level.
| Day | What pupils do | What the teacher or school does |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Ten minutes of reading after the register, at their own level. Log the story. | Post last week's team totals. Name the teams, not the pupils. |
| Tuesday | Ten minutes of reading. Short quiz or one-sentence summary. | Note who did not read on Monday and have a quiet word. |
| Wednesday | Ten minutes of reading. Pupils who missed a day can catch up. | Give spoken feedback to three or four pupils on what they read. |
| Thursday | Ten minutes of reading. Short quiz or summary. | Spot-check the count for one class in a friendly way. |
| Friday | Ten minutes of reading. Pupils recommend a story to a partner. | Add up the week. Score the share of each team that met the target. |
The week uses each part of the argument. Reading happens daily, after a fixed cue. Texts are at the pupil's level. The team score depends on everyone. Feedback is about reading, and results are shown by team.
Check what happens when the competition stops
A competition is a means. The end is pupils who read. So measure reading before the competition, during it and after it. If reading falls back to where it started, the competition was holding up the behaviour and little else had changed.
- Count how many pupils read each week before you start.
- Count the same thing during the competition.
- Count again four weeks after it ends, with no prize on offer.
- Ask a sample of pupils why they read. Listen for answers about the stories, not the points.
How to Measure Reading Progress in a Language Program explains what to track and how.
How iRead handles reading competitions
In iRead, the daily run gives students on the same global pack the same levelled story and the same daily game each day. Reading is the only way to score. Scores add up by school, and schools are matched only against schools at the same CEFR level. Public leaderboards show school-level results only, never individual students. School packs run the same daily game inside one school, class against class.
Frequently asked questions
How do you motivate students to read?
Start with interest, choice and success. Give pupils stories they want to finish, some say over what they read, and texts at a level they can manage alone. Add a fixed daily reading time. Use rewards and competition as support, and point them at reading itself.
Do reading competitions work for schools?
It depends on the design. Murayama and Elliot (2012) found no overall link between competition and performance, because competition helps some people and harms others. No controlled study we found tests school reading competitions. Team-based, fair and frequent formats are the safest, and you should measure the results.
Should schools give prizes for reading?
Keep them small. Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) found that expected tangible rewards lowered later interest in a task, and more so for children. Positive feedback raised interest. A modest shared prize and specific praise for the reading are safer than large individual prizes.
Are leaderboards good for reading motivation?
The evidence is mixed. Sailer and Homner (2020) found small positive effects of gamification overall. Hanus and Fox (2015) found that a course with a leaderboard and badges lowered university students' motivation. Showing team or school totals, not ranked lists of pupils, avoids the clearest risk.
How do you keep a reading competition fair?
Let every pupil read at their own level, and count something everyone can add to, such as stories finished. Match teams or schools against others at a similar level. Score participation or improvement as well as totals, and keep individual results private.
What is reading motivation?
It is the set of reasons a person reads. Schiefele and colleagues (2012) identify seven dimensions: curiosity, involvement, competition, recognition, grades, compliance and work avoidance. Curiosity and involvement are intrinsic motives. In their review, intrinsic motivation was the kind most clearly linked to how much pupils read.
Sources
- Anderson, R. C., Wilson, P. T., & Fielding, L. G. (1988). Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school. Reading Research Quarterly, 23(3), 285-303. doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.23.3.2
- Wigfield, A., & Guthrie, J. T. (1997). Relations of children's motivation for reading to the amount and breadth of their reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 420-432. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.89.3.420
- Schiefele, U., Schaffner, E., Möller, J., & Wigfield, A. (2012). Dimensions of reading motivation and their relation to reading behavior and competence. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 427-463. doi.org/10.1002/RRQ.030
- Guthrie, J. T., & Wigfield, A. (2000). Engagement and motivation in reading. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III (pp. 403-422). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Reading-Research-Volume-III/Kamil-Mosenthal-Pearson-Barr/p/book/9780805823998
- Takase, A. (2007). Japanese high school students' motivation for extensive L2 reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 19(1), 1-18. doi.org/10.64152/10125/66622
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
- Murayama, K., & Elliot, A. J. (2012). The competition-performance relation: A meta-analytic review and test of the opposing processes model of competition and performance. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1035-1070. doi.org/10.1037/a0028324
- Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
- Sailer, M., & Homner, L. (2020). The gamification of learning: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 32(1), 77-112. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09498-w
- Hanus, M. D., & Fox, J. (2015). Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and academic performance. Computers & Education, 80, 152-161. doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.08.019