Teacher enthusiasm and students’ reading achievement: Teachers’ stimulation of reading engagement and students’ reading enjoyment as mediators

Although the proposition that teacher enthusiasm can predict students’ academic enjoyment and achievement has been validated, few studies have examined the potential mechanism. This research explored how teachers’ stimulation of reading engagement served as a mediator between teacher enthusiasm and students’ reading enjoyment, and assessed the consequent influence on student reading proficiency. We performed a two-level path analysis on a sample comprising 12,058 15-year-old students from Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang in mainland China. The results revealed that teachers’ stimulation of reading engagement exerted a partial mediating role between teacher enthusiasm and students’ reading enjoyment at the student level, but a full mediation role at the school level. This indicates that it is important to establish a school policy to help enthusiastic teachers use effective teaching strategies to develop students’ reading enjoyment, such as stimulating students’ reading engagement, considering that emotion cannot automatically be transmitted from teachers to students at the school level without such teaching strategies. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).