WHY CHILDREN READ: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH

Understanding the basic needs and interests of children and how they relate to the reading process has been one of the goals of reading research. Surveys of children's leisure time reading interests and habits have been comprehensively explored on both a national and cross-cultural basis over the past fifty years (Brown & Knockover, 1974; Jenkinson, 1940; Scott, 1947; Terman & Lima, 1925). Using a variety of methodological techniques in collecting and analyzing the data, the results suggest several key factors which appear to affect interests in reading: sex, age socioeconomic status, and reading attainment (Greaney, 1980; Huus, 1979). These factors sug-gest that leisure readers tend to be girls, proficient in reading, middle class and in the upper elementary grades. While the identification of correlates of leisure reading has yielded important information regarding subject preferences, it has not significantly contributed to our understanding of the motivations that underlie these preferences nor to the reciprocal, interactive relationship between the reader and the reading material. In addition, potentially important personality variables such as curiosity for learning and the need for information, have generally been overlooked in the research. Huus, in an analysis of the studies of children's interests to date