This master?s thesis looks at discourses that use the pronoun ?hen?. The media debate in Sweden over this pronoun in 2012 started in connection with the publishing of a children?s picture book: Kivi och monsterhund, by Jesper Lundqvist and Bettina Jansson. The essay investigates how eight librarians, who take an interest in and work with gender issues, talk about the pronoun hen and about this picture book and other books that have characters which are not named as a sex/gender.The essay takes a discursive perspective on reality and on the construction of knowledge and carries out a discourse analysis of the librarians? talk in the qualitative interviews that were made for this study.

The purpose of this study is to carry out a follow-up study of the reading stimulating project Arts in Reading. The project was in progress between the years 2007 to 2009 in Sweden and nearly 80 librarians from 57 public libraries participated. The aim of the project was to initiate new methods fot how to stimulate reading for children. The promoters of the project wanted to initiate the use of new art forms in the work for reading promotion, encourage more collaboration with new actors in the culture area, and co-operate more with the children.The aim of the present study is to investigate to which extent Arts in Reading really succeeded in establishing its goals, whether new methods were brought about, and how this work was done. Another aim is to find out how librarians in public libraries work to develop children's reading.The theoretical framework is based on Ragnhild Söderbergh's term inculturation, Elisabeth Björklund's research on how children acquire literacy, and Lev S.

Abstract The aim of this study is to find out how teachers view the importance of reading in the teaching of foreign languages. In relation to this, we wish to gain understanding of what teachers want to achieve with reading, how they choose texts and what difficulties they encounter in getting their students to read. Six teachers from three different upper secondary schools in southern Sweden were interviewed for the study. We also examined the text-materials that they were using for their instruction. The findings show that students read mostly adapted texts from textbooks and, to a limited extent, authentic materials.

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..

AbstractThis study is based on my work as a secondary school teacher of literature and the Swedish language and rooted in my interest in developing knowledge about the importance of teaching literature in order to both cultivate young people?s reading habits and their view of themselves as readers. The more concrete purpose of this study is to examine a reading project that focuses on theories of literary perception and teaching literature.I examine four pupils who, in 2003, participated in the reading project as readers and compare this description with their view of themselves as readers seven years later. I complete the study by examining how they discuss reading and the teaching of literature. The method is qualitative and the empirics include materiel collected in two different time periods: first in 2003, in a class I taught in a secondary school; and second in 2010, when I examined four of the former pupils who participated in the project from 2003.

The aim of this study is to investigate librarians? opinions about books supported by the government and delivered for free to the main public libraries in every community. The study is also investigating how the governmentally supported books affect the process of buying books for the public libraries and how the librarians think about quality and mediation in the acquisition. The analysis is based upon interviews with six librarians that are responsible for the purchasing at five main libraries in small communities in the South of Sweden. The results from the interviews are discussed and analyzed from the perspective of mediation.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to present an overviewof a number of libraries? specially adapted media forchildren with special needs.We also wanted to see how the librarians worked to helpchildren with special needs, to take advantage of the librariescollections and activities. These special needs could bedyslexia but may also be disabilities which have resulted inthem being unable to read literature other than specialadapted literature. Examples of this literature are DAISY,book & DAISY, pictogram, bliss, ISAAC, easy reading,Braille, tactile picture books, and computer programs thatmake it easier for people to read in their own way with theirown skills.Using qualitative interviews we have interviewed sevenlibrarians. Through this process we have been able toascertain which methods public libraries use to meet theneeds of those children whose disabilities relate to reading.The interviews also explored how they are working withchildren who need more time than other children does whenit comes to reading.The results of the interviews showed that the librariesprovided a lot of special adapted media.

The aim of this thesis is to study the reading habits of Swedish librarians visualized by librarians from Götabiblioteken ? a collaboration of 14 public libraries in mid-Sweden ? focusing on the reading done on their spare time, even if work-related. We started with a survey sent out to 74 librarians in October 2013, answered by 56, and followed up by interviewing 7 of them in November.We tried to answer these questions:To what extent does the working librarians read on their spare time compared to before they started working?What literature do they read, now compared to before they started working?To what extent does their perception of what they should have read affect their private reading?In what way does a librarian in the beginning of their career differ in reading habits from the reading habits of a librarian with many years in the profession?The result of our study shows that most of the librarians read as much or more than before they started to work. They are more selective in their choice of literature and are affected by their work in it in different ways.

In this essay I have studied how the kid?s school start are described in picture books. The studied questions are: How the school is described in these selected picture books; what feeling does the main character have into the school start; how the teachers are described in this selected picture books and how are the power relationship described in these selected picture books?The method I have chosen for this essay is a discourse analysis of seven selected picture books with the meaning of starting school. All books studied are written during the 1990 and forward.

The purpose of this study is to examine what view librarians have on reading promotion for adults, in particular reading circles, and in which way earlier experiences, education and competence form this view. To what extent, if any, do perceptions of professional identity influence the interest to carry out some kind of reading circles for adults?Our study is based on qualitative interviews with librarians, both those in charge of reading circles in libraries and those who are not. As theoretical starting point we have used Andrew Abbott's work on theory of professions and Jofrid Karner Smidt's thesis on literary preferences and different kinds of mediation of literature. For our analysis we will also use earlier studies on the subject to place our study in a wider context.Our conclusions show that the librarians in our study have an ambivalent view on their profession and professional identity.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to investigate the reading habits of six men who do not read fiction. The reason for my interest is the fact that men statistically read less fiction than women, and that there are few existing studies of this subject. The study investigates why these men do not read fiction, their attitudes towards literature, their reading habits, their leisure-time interests and if they experience fiction from other activities. Furthermore the study includes a discussion of whether or not there might be a connection between the men?s reading habits and their identity as men, as well as a discussion of all of the above in relation to their social background.

TPB, The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille, has requested a study to investigate the organization and content of a possible future Swedish web portal for users with reading disabilities. The aim of this thesis is to conduct such a study, with an emphasis on knowledge organization. The main aspects studied are formal description, representation, search and retrieval, document retrieval, and additionally also aspects related to content. The following questions are answered in this thesis: - How are web portals, online databases and Internet libraries for users with reading disabilities constructed, from an organization of knowledge point of view? - How can these solutions for knowledge organization be incorporated into a possible Swedish web portal? - With regards to content, which additional aspects are present in the studied web portals, online databases and Internet libraries? The questions are addressed through a detailed study of ten web portals, online databases and Internet libraries from Nordic and Anglo-American parts of the world.

The aim of the study was to explore how persons with aphasiaexperience literacy and reading and writing. Seven persons with mild-moderateaphasia were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed andanalysed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in three mainthemes; A changed reading, A changed writing and How to adjust andaccommodate to new conditions. The most apparent aspect was that theinformants experienced that literacy had changed, regarding what and how theyread/write.

The purpose ot this study is to investigate how two teachers of fifth grade say they are working with reading comprehension in their teaching. Furthermore the aim is to investigate how the teachers' instruction in reading cmprehension expresses itself. The study was conducted from a teachers perspective and the questions that the stydy will answer are: How do two teachers in fifth grade believe they should teach in order to develop reading comprehension among their own students, and what methods, activities and materials are the teachers using in order to develop students' reading omprehension in the educational practise. The methods used during the study were interviews and observations. The observations were made in order to complete the picture from the interviews.

The aim of this paper is to examine why Swedish teachers and multilingual secondary   school pupils think it is important to read fiction, how Swedish teachers work with fiction in the multicultural classroom and how they motivate their multilingual pupils to read more by adapting fiction to their capabilities and experiences. We have done interviews with four Swedish teachers and 12 multilingual pupils. The following questions are the starting point of this essay:Why do Swedish teachers and multilingual pupils think that it is important to read fiction?  ?How can the Swedish teachers in the multicultural classroom motivate their multilingual pupils to read more fiction?The result of this paper showed that both the Swedish teachers and the multilingual pupils thought it was important to read fiction because it partly gives themselves the opportunity to acquaint with other cultures and it helps them to improve their language. The teachers motivate their multilingual pupils by reading out loud, reading in groups and by minimizing language difficulties that may occur in the fiction.