Educational responsibility requires that culturally relevant curriculum be taught to students. Unfortunately, in many secondary ELA classrooms, content continues to revolve around canonical texts written mostly by white males. With increasing negative reading attitudes and poor reading skills among adolescents, the authors sought to investigate how text-relatability may affect students’ reading enthusiasm and comprehension. They asked: Would students relate to or have higher reading enthusiasm for a contemporary adolescent text that reflected their teen culture? In this study, 16 students from a Title I school read a contemporary adolescent text and a classical text over a 6 week period. Students were divided into two groups, alternating the text sequence. Reading enthusiasm, comprehension, and text relatability were measured after each text reading. Quantitative data analysis showed relatability to the classical text was positively correlated to relatability to the adolescent text, and reading enthusiasm for the classical text was positively correlated to reading enthusiasm for the adolescent text. No significant correlation existed between text types and text-relatability, reading enthusiasm, or reading comprehension. Qualitative data indicated that text-relatability and reading preference were higher for the contemporary adolescent text. Implications of these findings, including how to further refine the text-relatability instrument will be discussed
