This two years master?s thesis in Library and Information Science examines book reviews and articles aboutbooks and authorship in media directed to children between the ages of 8 and 14. The aim is to increase knowledgeof children?s reading choices and view of reading. This is motivated by the decrease in literacy and sparetime reading among Swedish children and adolescents.

This masters thesis examines the reading environment during "booktalk", with special reference to a reading project in compulsory comprehensive and upper secondary schools in Stockholm. The main question is: What does the reading environment look like during booktalk? Three questions are asked: Which factors affect the reading environment? Which are the conditions concerning book selection and book availability? How do the librarians perform as enabling adults? Different groups of pupils, together with their teachers and the librarian, are studied during booktalks in five schools. The study uses a qualitative approach, which takes the form of open observations during 15 booktalks and one interview with the two librarians involved in the project and studies of literature. The theoretical framework is Aidan Chambers theory relating to reading environment and its effects upon the reading process.

Developing good reading skills is crucial for all pupils in school, and the reading bookis a tool for achieving that. Pupils are entitled to good reading instruction, regardless ofwhich reading level they are at, and regardless of the level of the reader they have beengiven. The aim of the study is to examine a particular teaching material and describe thedifferences that exist between a simpler and a more difficult variant of the same reader.The study is a textual analysis focused on the two readers for grade 2 from the materialDiamantjakten (The Diamond Hunt). The study shows that the two books display greatdifferences. Reading the simpler book involves a smaller amount of text, fewerdescriptive expressions, and a smaller number of words, but it does make demands onthe reader?s ability to read between the lines.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers choose to work with the teaching of reading and writing skills, how teachers justify their choice of teaching method and how the documentation of student development is being used. This paper also discusses the definition of reading and writing, phonological awareness and how different reading- and writing educational methods can be combined. The gathering of information has been done through a literature review in which I have looked at past research on reading and writing. I have also conducted qualitative interviews with teachers involved in literacy learning. The result of my research shows that it is not possible to determine which literacy learning methods that are most effective.

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

Research reports as PISA and PIRLS show that reading comprehension among Swedish students have deteriorated in recent years and that girls have better reading comprehension than boys. The basis for this study is Maj-Gun Johansson's reading comprehension test done during the four years between the years 2005-2008 in the seventh grade in a municipality in Sweden. The main purpose of this study is to examine reading literacy in terms of the influence of content and form of texts viewed from a gender perspective. The study is divided into two parts. The first part is a survey on local reading comprehension compared with results from a similar national text.

This essay examines the decline of reading comprehension in Swedish schools, and also aims to provide insight into the debate concerning a literary canon and its usage in schools. While some claim that the literary canon is only a list of irrelevant white dead men which only serves to perpetuate feelings of alienation in, for example, female students, others see it as a means to bring society together using the only literature that stood the test of time. This essay will look to studies concerning reading comprehension, and questions regarding reading habits which our own students answered. It will also explain the different viewpoints of both sides of the canon debate.There are several studies that show this decline in reading comprehension, PISA and PIRLS being the foremost of them. They point to a trend where the reading skills of boys are much worse than those of girls, a trend which still has not panned out.Bloom and the different researchers who are the basis for Verhaest's thesis are of the opinion that canonical literature serves a purpose in that it teaches students aesthetic literary values.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate if the reading habits of teacher students are influenced by merit and descent. The empiric material consists of six questionnaires answered by students at the teacher training with Swedish at the upper secondary school as their first topic. The questionnaire comprised questions about reading habits in the childhood and today and information concerning merits and descent.Pierre Bourdieu?s sociological ideas about cultural capital transmitted from parent to child and the concept of habitus are used as a theoretical framework regarding descent.

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

The purpose of this work has been to understand the reading group from the perspective of the society. The studyhas taken place in the city of Västerås and the results can thus not be used in a more generalized sence. Byfocusstudies conducted with members from four different reading groups connected in different ways to the libraryin Västerås I have reached the following conclusions.According to Jürgen Habermas theories the reading groups, with their ideals regarding education and meetingswhere everybody are equals, belong in the part of the public sphere that he calls literary. There are someconnections to the political sphere, for exempel the down to earth quality of the literature that is the choice ofthe groups and their way of discussing it.One problem that occures when one tries to apply Habermas idéas regarding the public sphere on readinggroups is that the criteria Habermas considers as vital to sphere for it to work properly does not seem to workon the reading groups. Inclusion, eqality and freedom of subjects are necessary to create a public sphere.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to analyse school librarians and teachers perspective of childrens reading and reading progress, the impact of informational texts on childrens reading and how school librarians and teachers work/teach to improve their students understanding of informational texts. We also intend to study what consequences school librarians and teachers believe that childrens reduced understanding of informational texts can have in the long run and how this could be improved. The theories applied encompass different literature-pedagogical strategies, theories about reading purpose and direction of the reading process together with a theory that shows the school librarys function in the education. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with one school librarian and one teacher at three different schools. The material has then been analysed and interpreted from theories and earlier research.

The aim of this study has been to get a better knowledge and understanding of the way teachers are working with reading comprehension in the grades 1 and 2, which was done through description of 5 teachers way of working.The theoretical basis of this study grounds in the sociocultural perspective. I based my study on Vygotsky?s theory which claims that strategies transferred from adults to children through social interaction get internalised and then used independently. I have also made use of several theories that specifically deal with reading comprehension that allowed me to identify this area of teaching as a complex one, consisting of several elements. In order to understand a text on a deeper level a reader has to be able to infer, or read between the lines.

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate and illustrate the measures that parents, teachers and school librarians can take in order to influence childrens reading, and, more importantly, how these attempts performed by the adults in the childs environment affect the reading habits of the child. The methods used include qualitative interviews, undertaken with eight students/children, their teacher and a school librarian, and an observation of a book talk in the studied class. Considering that no interviews have been executed with the parents, the results presented regarding the parents prospects of encouraging childrens reading, are therefore to be seen from the perspective of the children, and analysed as such. Three different theories have been employed in order to elucidate the results of the study; Bourdieus theory about the cultural capital transmitted from parent to child; Aidan Chambers theory on the book talk as promoting reading; and Louise Limbergs theory on the levels of the school library and its consequent prognosis of working to promote reading. The results of the study concur with Bourdieus theory, in that the childrens reading habits in most cases seem to have been affected by the amount of involvement that the parents have given to promote their reading.

This master thesis examines online reading groups with swedish participants. The aim is, by way of introduction, to investigate what kind of online reading groups that exist and how they work. The overall question of the thesis is: how do a conversation about books on the Internet look like? The theory used is Grounded Theory and this is a methodology which has influenced the hole structure of the study. Grounded Theory apply that issues and hypothesis must be created from the collected material, and the author collected for this reason material in the form of survey answers, email-conversations, blogmaterial and articles to draw up exact issues based on this material.The material was sorted into four different categories; social reading, reading fellowship, virtual freedom and anonymity and the issues were formulated according to this categories.