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In this study, we examined the effects of a mother’s reading motivation on the home literacy environment. Seven hundred fifty-seven mothers with three to five year old children participated in this study and completed the Adult Motivation for Reading Scale and the Home Literacy Environment Questionnaire. The subcategories of the Adult Motivation for Reading Scale are “reading as part of self,” “reading efficacy,” “reading for recognition,” and “reading to do well in other realms.” The Home Literacy Environment Questionnaire has three subcategories, namely reading books, reading behavior and modeling of parents, and literacy learning. The mean, standard deviation, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and hierarchical multiple regression analysis were used to analyze the data. The results showed that (1) the home literacy environment was significantly different depending on the mother’s education and family income levels, (2) the mother’s reading motivation also differed significantly depending on the mother’s education and family income levels, and (3) the mother’s reading motivation has a significant explanatory effect on the home literacy environment. In addition, the mothers falling into the reading motivation subcategories of “reading part of self” or “reading to do well in other realms” were found to enrich their home literacy environment. Therefore, this study demonstrates that the mother’s reading motivation is an important factor affecting the home literacy environment.

This study examined the emergent literacy development of children and the effects of the home literacy environment on it. 861 pairs each-consisting of a mother and a child aged from three to six years old were asked to complete the early literacy parent questionnaire (Boudreau, 2005) and the home literacy environment questionnaire (Park & Kim, 2008). The results showed that : (1) girls achieved higher scores than boys in emergent literacy and its subcategories. (2) there were age differences in all of the subcategories of emergent literacy except the categories of `orientation toward literacy` and `phonological awareness`. (3) The study revealed that `reading books` in the home literacy environment was the most contributive variable in predicting emergent literacy after controlling the age and gender followed by `literacy learning`