he study was born from an interest into how language students are driven to read in a second language, do their reading preferences and habits in this second language follow those of reading in their mother tongue. The study paid attention to the issue of print versus electronic reading with these students. The study was conducted with students aged between eight and sixteen years of age at a Turkish private school. The empirical data was drawn from 182 completed questionnaires and four group interview sessions during 2019. Analysis of the results show that reading preferences and habits are transferred from mother tongue to 2nd language reading, especially the feeling of the importance of reading and the pleasure from reading. Further, the study concludes that the majority of these students prefer paper-based reading for pleasure as they consider it an escape from the digital connection that normally engulfs them. The study also concluded that English is often used online for research, in fact most students saw it as a lingua franca for academic research purposes, and students accept that digital reading is necessary in this context. The study found that the motivators to read that had the largest effect on both reading in Turkish and in English were the belief that reading is important to the students and the amount of enjoyment they felt by reading. Further, as expected, the motivation to read has a greater influence on frequency of reading in Turkish than English.