Recent international and national testing results in Australia indicate that disadvantaged students from culturally, linguistically and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds remain disproportionally represented among those who fail to attain the minimum benchmark in reading and other literacy assessments. However, international studies on reading motivation and engagement have seldom specifically taken disadvantaged students as a focus and have paid little attention to the contextual influences. Within Australia, different groups of disadvantaged students learn to read (and to avoid reading) within different academic, cultural, socioeconomic and physical constraints/affordances. Simply attributing low reading achievement to a lack of engagement motivation such as a lack of intrinsic reading interest does not provide us with a full picture as to why diverse groups of disadvantaged students avoid reading. This paper provides a summary of current research on reading motivation and explains the design of a longitudinal mixed-methods project that looks into why, how and under what circumstances selected students engaged in or disengaged from classroom reading over four years. Rogoff's (1995) three planes of analysis was adopted to construct a theoretical framework for researching and analysing reading motivation and engagement within the dynamic interplay of individual, social and classroom contexts in the four studies within this project-multiple case study, longitudinal survey, classroom observation, and partnership model for development. This paper delineates the relationship between these four studies and explains how they cumulatively develop a systematic knowledge base for understanding reading engagement of disadvantaged students and developing innovative practice for promoting reading for these students.