The aim of this study was to investigate how four middle school teachers use and process the contents in read-aloud books, to stimulate the pupils interest in reading and increase reading comprehension. A qualitative approach was used to collect data, through interviews and observations. The findings show that all of the teachers work with read-aloud books regularly. The teachers state that read-aloud books have a positive effect on pupils language, vocabulary, reading comprehension, imagination and ability to reflect. The teachers have three distinctive purposes with read aloud-books, a moment of relaxation, create an interest in books and increase the pupils reading comprehension.

In school today pupils come in contact with all kinds of reading books. Education of Swedish reading development sometimes contain reading books organized at different levels of difficulty, with different amount of text. The purpose of the different difficulty levels is to give the less skilled readers an easier book and stronger readers a more difficult book. The purpose with this study is to find out if the book which is classified as more difficult, in reality is the most difficult and if the book which is considered to be easier really is. To find answers to these questions I will examine previous researcher?s theories on difficulty levels in reading books.

Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are ubiquitous in the environment today and they have been detected even in remote areas such as the Arctic. PFASs can be transported by the atmosphere and ocean currents but the transport mechanism is not fully understood. PFASs may be harmful to organisms due to their persistence in the environment, bio-accumulation potential and toxicity. Studies have shown that PFASs can cause adverse effects on the metabolism as well as the endocrine- and reproduction systems in organisms. In this study, PFASs were investigated in glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus) (n=5) and black guillemot (Cepphus grylle) (n=4) from Svalbard.

The general purpose of this dissertation is to study picture communication in picture books and it addresses the following questions:What is the illustrator?s role in the process of making a picture book? What communicative qualities do pictures have in picture books and how do pictures interact with texts? What methods do illustrators use to visualize the meaning of stories in picture books?A genre analysis, a literature study and an interview of a professional illustrator has been conducted to answer the questions. I found that all objects that make up pictures, the arrangement, colours and shapes contribute to the meaning in diverse ways. Pictures also communicate in a different way than texts. An important difference between pictures and texts in the context of picture books is that pictures are more open for interpretation.

This thesis consists of a discourse and queer theoretical text and image analysis of school books in English used in the Swedish upper secondary school.  The whole content of two school books have been analysed from a norm critical perspective but one chapter in each of them has been analysed more thoroughly than the rest. These two chapters form the major part of the analysis.The thesis? problem formulation and objective derive from a personal experience of being a teacher student and part time teacher in Swedish schools. This experience shows the prevalence of a strong heteronormativity both in the schools? every day life and in the used school books.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the situation for ebooksin Swedish public libraries. The background is anincreasing lending of e-books in public libraries, with anacquisition model formed when e-books were more of anexperiment in a few libraries. The debate has escalated in therecent years and in this thesis I aim to investigate thelibraries? experience with e-books and the current pricemodel. The empirical material comes from interviews witheight head of public libraries in the Västra Götaland region.As theoretical background, I have used Michael Buckland?sfour roles of collections and price models from Lee andBoyle.My results show ambivalence with the price model.

The aim of the study is to show how children and adults are described in three picture books, examining how children and adults are portrayed in text-and-picture narrative and how this has changed over time. We have analysed how the characters in the books are presented and how the representation of children and adults has changed in our own times.The material for the study consists of three picture books from different periods, with the focus on how children and adults are described as the common point of departure. The analysed picture books are: Tomtebobarnen (Beskow 1919), Aja baja, Alfons Åberg! (Bergström 1972) and Snäll (Dahle 2008).We have arrived at the conclusion that a text-and-picture narrative is in very large measure a reflection of the outlook on children, childhood and child rearing at the time when the book was published. The result shows that the greatest change that has happened is that parents? and adults? dominance in the books has declined over the years, and that children have been given a more prominent role.

The purpose of this paper was to study how the death is described in some books for children and how the books may affect the readers. I chose five books where the leading character was a child who lost a close relative like a parent or a sibling. I asked the book questions like you would do at an interwiew.The main questions were:· What do the children think about the death?· How does the child react when it finds out that a parent or a sibling is dead?· What does the child think about seeing the dead person and how does it react at the funeral?· From what or whom do they find the strength to move on?· What support does the child have from people in the surroundings?· How may the books affect the readers?The results showed that the books give you an image close to the reality. The children had different ways to mourn.

The goal with this essay is to determine if the image of preschool, in a specified number of picture books, is consistent with the posted goals of the preschool operations in the curriculum of preschool published in 1998 (hereafter Lpfö 98). Besides that the essay is also planned to look at how the preschool?s status have changed after Lpfö 98 was established and if this is shown in the picture books. Therefore this essay will focus on picture books published 1998-2009 because after that a new version of Lpfö 98 was published. Also the picture books chosen for this study are all stories about preschool or kindergarten.The questions that this essay will answer are: How are the activities in preschool described, and how do they match the guidelines in Lpfö 98? In what way has the status of preschool been affected since Lpfö 98 was published? In what way has the teachers? role been affected and how is that shown?In order to answer these questions I will use a quality text analysis of picture books for children.

The aim of this essay has been to find out if children can identify themselves in childrens literature describing children who have immigrated. We wanted to investigate if the interest in reading books about children who have immigrated was the same whether the investigated childrens origin was Swedish or not. We chose two books for this purpose. We also wanted to see what the access to books about children who have immigrated was at three libraries. The locations for the libraries were; in the investigated children´s school, at the main library in the municipality and at a smaller library also located in the municipality.

In 2003 the libraries of ten municipalities in the northern part of Sweden were each given 10 000 (SEK) by the BIN-project to purchase books on demand instead of making inter-library loans. This attempt was called Köpa på efterfrågan (Purchasing on demand). The purpose of this master thesis is to evalutate Köpa på efterfrågan. The results of the evaluation show that the books purchased on demand were quite popular. Almost all the purchased books were non-fictional with most books being bought within the field of medicin.

AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate how a picture book for children is transformed into an easy-to-read version for children who have just started reading. I examine two versions of Emil of Lönneberga. One of the books is the orginal picture book of Emil in Lönneberga and was written by Astrid Lindgren (1963), while the other is an easy-toreadversion of the book, as adapted by the author Helena Renvall (1977). I have conducted a comparative study as a text and picture analysis of the material, with the focus on the adaptation of the original story. The adaptation in this case is a revision intended to make the story easier to read and more accessible to today?s children.

Vår avsikt är att i denna uppsats utifrån Donald L. Horowitzs teori om etniska konflikter, förklara varför etniska majoriteter attackerar etniska minoriteter. Vi utför en fallstudie av Sri Lanka och av händelserna innan juli 1983 dvs. det som ledde fram till upploppet, ?Black July?.

The purpose of this research is to analyze six children?s books from a gender perspective and thereby investigate in what way boys and girls respectively are portrayed in books.My general question is:How are boys and girls portrayed in children?s books?This question has been broken down into four minor questions:What type of clothes are the people wearing? Are people predominantly male or female? Have people specific attributes which are linked to their sex? Are people performing specific actions which are linked to their sex?In my research I have combined quantitative and qualitative methods and my theoretical framework has been gender.This study reveals a change in children's books with respect to how the different genders are portrayed. The progression is towards a more equal portrayal but despite this, patterns typical for the respective genders shine through..

Having different kinds of literature is an important part of the education in school and schoolbooks, in shape of reading-books, are common in the first year of primary school. The texts pupils encounter in school are important for how they form their identity and thoughts about what is right or wrong and what is natural or unnatural. People of other ethnicity than Swedish, or with another skin colour than white, have often in the past been portrayed negatively in reading-books as if they are of less worth. According to the Curriculum for the Compulsory School System (Lpo94) the school shall act for understanding of all people and every person?s equal value.The study analyses how ethnicity is portrayed in reading-books for pupils in the first year of primary school.