Abstract
In this study, we collected 318 Taiwanese fifth graders’ daily activity data with graphical diaries, adapted from Anderson, Wilson,and Fielding’s (1988) and Allen, Cipielewski, and Stanovich’s (1992) instruments, for seven school days and three non-school days, and investigated the relationships among gender, family cultural resources, time spent on teacher-assigned extracurricular reading, and the student’s recreational reading attitude, academic reading attitude, with questionnaires both developed by McKenna and Kear (1990), and vocabulary size, measured by Chinese character recognition test developed by Hung et al. (2006). With hierarchical regressions, results indicated that when we put gender and family cultural resources into the model altogether, the latter, measured by the reported amount of books at home, was found to be the predictor for all three dependent variables, findings corroborated many of previous studies; while the former was found to be predictor for recreational reading attitude and vocabulary sizes, but not for academic reading attitude. Furthermore, when we added time spent on teacher-assigned extracurricular reading into the model, we found that gender became a non-significant predictor for vocabulary sizes; and time spent on teacher-assigned extracurricular reading was found to have significant predictive power on both recreational and academic reading attitudes beyond gender and family cultural resources. In other words, teacher-assigned extracurricular reading plays an important role on enhancing Taiwanese fifth graders’ reading attitude, and at the same time it helped to lessen the gender gap on the student’s performance on vocabulary.