RELC Journal 1–8 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0033688216661258 rel.sagepub.com Using Positive Education to Enliven the Teaching of Reading George M. Jacobs James Cook University, Singapore Willy A. Renandya Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Abstract Positive education is a relatively new, student centred approach which takes an optimistic view of learning, seeks to build on students’ individual and collective strengths and encourages students to take responsibility for collaboratively interacting with peers for the benefit of themselves and others. This article begins by explaining some of the roots, research, principles and applications of positive education. Seven positive education principles are: connections with others, responsibility, gratitude, positivity, strengths, kindness and meaning. Next, the article considers how positive education can inform two approaches to the teaching of reading: dialogic reading and extensive reading. Dialogic reading involves students interacting with teachers and peers about what they read. This interaction can include topics related to emotions and values. Extensive reading involves students in reading large quantities of text at and around students’ current reading levels. Sometimes, students may do activities to share with others about what they read. The last part of the article provides ideas and examples of how the dialogic reading and extensive reading might benefit from insights from positive education. Keywords Positive education, Student centred learning, Dialogic reading, Extensive reading, Positive psychology It was only about two years ago that a colleague introduced us to Positive Psychology (PP) (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and just a year ago that another colleague introduced us to Positive Education (PE) (Norrish et al., 2013), the application of PP to Corresponding author: Willy A Renandya, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Block 3-3-172, 637616, Singapore. Email: willy.renandya@nie.edu.sg 0 0 10.1177/0033688216661258RELC JournalJacobs and Renandya research-article 2016 Viewpoint