This study is based on 26 essays about A Good Book, written by as many participants inSwedish classes in secondary education for adults. The object is to analyse the students'views on fiction and reading: What books they prefer, but also why and how they read.Objectivity and subjectivity in literary criticism is also discussed.Most favoured author both among men and women is Stephen King. The majority of thebooks mentioned are translated from English. The women also read historical and psychological novels while the men prefer fantasy. The question whether a book is goodor not is in the students' opinion only a matter of taste.

The main purpose of this study is to identify and compare classical pianists' understanding of sight-reading. Six pianists were interviewed, four professionals and two students. All of them concidered good sight-reading ability to be an advantage, especially when rehearsing, but most important is to be a good musicians performing music thoroghly gone through..

The purpose of this project is to survey the presence of folk expressions, i.e. proverbs, proverbial expressions, wellerisms and familiar expressions, in some of the realistic children?s books by Astrid Lindgren. The purpose also includes the study of the contextual and pragmatic functions of the expressions as well as how the expressions are integrated into the text by the change of the formulaic standard structure. The contextual and pragmatic function concern when, how and why the expressions are used and who the users of the expressions are.

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.

This project investigates how four teachers work to encourage their pupils? love of reading. The study was conducted with the focus on teachers working in grades 1?3. The teacher?s view of their own role in furthering love of reading is also considered.It is hoped that other teachers will gain inspiration and ideas about how to work to motivate their pupils to read.To ascertain the four teachers? opinions and thoughts I conducted qualitative interviews which I then analysed with the help of sentence concentration.The study shows that the teachers work in similar ways, but what they all have in common is that they further love of reading through methods that include conversation and communication with classmates and teacher.

The aim of this master thesis is to discuss the access to literature and reading by mentally retarded persons, and how this is affected by library and care taking staffs awareness of mentally retarded persons needs of literature and reading. The reason why we decided to choose this essay topic, is that there is a lack of research about mentally retarded persons relationship with libraries, literature and reading in the field of library- and information science. This groups needs must be brought to sight, so that they can take part in the literature just as anyone else, on their own conditions. Our study involves interviews with four librarians, three reading representatives and a co-ordinator at the Easy-to-Read Foundation. We can establish that all of our informants prove to have significant knowledge about mentally retarded persons and their needs of literature and reading.

To find useful methods of reading instructions for pupils with Cerebral palsy is a complex but at the same time very challenging work. The main focus of this research lies in studying the pupils work focusing on special adaptation of educational materials and means of assistance for pupils with Cerebral palsy. In trying to get a complete picture of the work with the reading instruction I don?t think that it can be described only by studying the work, it also demands an inside look at the job the working group performs. My overarching purpose of this research is to try out measures to further develop the work with reading instruction for pupils with Cerebral palsy.

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 purpose of this study is to investigate the reading methods that pedagogues, active in classes 1-3, use in the first stage of learning to read and how they consider their own choices of methods. In the theoretical background I sort out the basic differences between synthetic and analytic methods of acquiring the skills of reading. The analytic reading method means that the skills of reading starts with the complete text in order to later analyze the parts of the text. The synthetic method approach is based on a reading method where the parts are linked as a whole. The two methods are considered antipodes but can also be looked upon as complements in the current governing documents.

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.

This two years master?s thesis is a review and exploration of the Swedish debate concerning children?s literature from the 19th century to the present, as well as the evaluation and analysis of four adaptations of the tale Red Riding Hood. The aims are to identify how ideas and values regarding the role of children?s literature in society have developed over time and to contribute with a knowledge base for continued reflection and discussion on the subject of children?s reading and mediation of children?s literature in public libraries.The theory and method used in the thesis, is primarily based on the discourse analysis of Michel Foucault. I have identified four main discourses: the educational discourse, the liberation discourse, the politicized dis- course and the popular discourse.

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.