This paper conducts a qualitative examination based on interviews with six childrens librarians. The purpose is to put a perspective on the librarians competence and focal knowledge within the area of reading promotion and reading stimulation aimed for children, and also to examine how this competence and knowledge is constructed. The work is based on the following questions: How do childrens librarians experience reading promotion and reading stimulation within their profession? Which competence and what knowledge do childrens librarians experience as most important in order to make their work with reading promotion and reading stimulation function? What can be concluded regarding the construction of their competence and knowledge? The analysis is carried out from theories about competence, tacit knowledge and reading promotion. Following primary conclusions are drawn from the study: The professional role is mainly experienced as promoting reading as pleasure, but also as an important factor for childrens language development.

Since reading difficulties is a growing problem in Society and a problem that hinders Children to take an active part in every day life, I wanted to investigate how the School Library can be an educational resource for students with reading difficulties. Using qualitative interviews, I have gained insight into how three school librarians and two teachers work with Students with reading difficulties at two different Schools.The Respondents feel that they have the Knowledge necessary to work with students with reading difficulties, but Wish they had more Resources in terms of Time and Staff to help Students achieve School Goals even better. There are always new assistive technology for Students with Reading Difficulties, and an important part of the Educational work of the School Library, is to be informed of the Facilities available and how they work. I show, in my Research the importance of cooperation between school libraries and teachers to provide the students with reading difficulties the love of reading and work to promote reading. It is important that the School Librarian is an integral part of the School's Team to take full advantage of every opportunity to help the Reading Impaired Students with Information and finding the right Reading Level.

International reading comprehension studies, like PIRLS and PISA, state that the reading comprehension of Swedish students has decreased significantly since 2000. As a consequence, the National Agency of Education has made reading comprehension teaching a prioritised field in terms of further education for teachers. There has also been a change in Lgr 11, the national curriculum for compulsory school, where it is stated that teaching in reading strategies shall be a part of the central content throughout compulsory school. When the pupils reach upper secondary school level, reading comprehension education is no longer a part of the curriculum. Today, students at upper secondary school for individuals with learning disabilities currently share the same curriculum as the ordinary upper secondary school.

Children of today are surrounded by many different kinds of media. Books have to compete with new media like computers, video games, many TV-channels etc. The aim of this study has been to investigate the reading habits of 9-12-year old boys in their spare time, and their reasons for reading related to their use of other media. Our interest has been to shed light on the boys reading habits, their preferences and motives for reading and their reading functions. Even though our focus has been on their reading, we also have examined their use of other media and the function of this use.

AbstractThe purpose with this study is to find out how pedagogues, who teach in the early years of primary school, motivate and stimulate all pupils so they want to read a lot of fiction. The research also includes finding out more about why the pedagogues work as they do. The research starts with a study of current literature which deals with how teachers should work with motivation and stimulation in school. To find out how the pedagogues work in school I have made qualitative interviews with four pedagogues who work in the early years of primary school. The result shows that all of the pedagogues motivate and stimulate pupils in similar ways.

The aim of this master's thesis is to investigate how adults and especially children's librarians and intermediate level teachers experience children's literature. The aim is also to examine how children at the age of nine to twelve experience the literature that is written for them, according to a few master's theses written at Bibliotekshögskolan in Boras. Which criteria in children's books do the different groups consider as the most important, that the children can learn something when reading or is it the experience of the literature itself that is the most important? To fulfil the aim of this master's thesis I have interviewed three intermediate level teachers and three children's librarians and the result has been analysed using a model created by Maria Nikolajeva that shows four ways to get close to children's literature. My study is too small to be counted as a general result but it shows that both the children's librarians and the intermediate level teachers mainly ends up in the field that concerns the reading experience one can have when reading fiction.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine projects for readingpromotion, aimed at boys, between 8 and 16 years of age. Therelations between librarians approaches to reading and methodsfor reading promotion are analysed with a gender perspective.The study is based on qualitative methods. Librarians involved infour reading projects have been interviewed. In the analysis, ourempirical material is related to theories of approaches to reading.Results have also been compared with earlier studies regardingboys reading, reading promotion, gender and male stereotypes.We find that an emancipatory approach towards reading is themost common. The librarians´ views showed that discussion,development, reading for pleasure and focus on the content of thebook were central to the methods used in the projects.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of an intervention that focuses on phonics, decoding, reading speed and phonological awareness for 8-9 year old children in reading difficulties. Participants were selected on the basis of screening test results in grade one (decoding and reading comprehension). The participants were divided into two groups, an intervention group (A1, n=10 children) and a control group (A2, n=10). A1 received 30 minutes of intense reading instruction every day for six weeks from special educational needs teachers on top of their usual classroom based reading instruction. The control group received only their usual classroom-based reading instruction.

My curiosity concerning what pupils read and write during leisure time led me to gather information using a quantative method. The study's aim is to investigate which reading and writing habits they have during their time outside school. A comparison was done of pupils at school year level 3 and level 4 in two different schools with the intention of investigating the influence of social background on reading and writing habits. 137 pupils filled in survey forms and thereafter the MYSTAT statistic program was used to process the information. The results point towards that the pupils read story books both more often and for a longer time than any other type of literature and that they read them often or very seldom.

The aim of the study is to investigate how teachers in grades 1­­­­­­­­­­­?3 use reading aloud to develop the pupils? reading comprehension and how they reflect on the method. The study is based on interviews with four teachers, all of them working in these grades. The interviews have been interpreted hermeneutically and the statements compiled in accordance with the aim and research questions. The results indicate that all the teachers are aware that reading aloud can be used as a resource to develop pupils? reading comprehension.

The aim of this study is to investigate how a number of fathers read and what their perceptions of both their own readingand the reading they experience with their child/children look like. I also want to investigate their thoughts about the importance of reading to children. The study is based upon qualitative interviewswith four fathers who are active readers and have children between 3-6 years of age. The analysis does not offer any generalizations. As a conceptual framework for this study, I used Sten Furhammar?s categories of different types of reading to find out what fathers reading habits look like and what they wish to obtain.

Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties and Their Language and Cognitive AbilitiesA Comparison with Children with a Cochlear ImplantAbstractThe aim of this study was to examine the cognitive abilities that are important for reading in children with reading disabilities, children with a cochlear implantation and typically developed children. 64 children aged 10-12 years participated in the study. To answer the question at issue we used the following tests: Block Design from WISC III, PPVT III, TOWRE, SL 40 and a few chosen tests out of the SIPS battery. On tests of the lexical access children with reading disabilities performed at the same level as hearing children, while the children with a cochlear implant performed significantly lower. Test of the phonological and complex working memory showed that children with reading disabilities performed significantly higher than children with a cochlear implant, but at the same time lower than typically developed children on the test of phonological working memory.

Finnish student have for several years proved to be successful in reading in international studies. This interview based study aims to describe how teachers in Finnish schools for Swedish speaking children are relating to reading and reading education during the first two years of schooling. The result shows that reading, reading training and reading comprehension are natural elements in all teaching during the first two years in school and that teaching is based on students? ability and interest. The teachers claim that they provide the students with varying opportunities to practice different kinds of reading.

My curiosity concerning what pupils read and write during leisure time led me to gather information using a quantative method. The study's aim is to investigate which reading and writing habits they have during their time outside school. A comparison was done of pupils at school year level 3 and level 4 in two different schools with the intention of investigating the influence of social background on reading and writing habits. 137 pupils filled in survey forms and thereafter the MYSTAT statistic program was used to process the information. The results point towards that the pupils read story books both more often and for a longer time than any other type of literature and that they read them often or very seldom.

The purpose of this study was to, from the teacher's point of view; discover pupils with reading difficulties in connection with text assignments in mathematics, the teacher's support for these students, if difficulties coincide and whether it's the mathematics teacher's responsibility to make sure pupils with reading difficulties develop their reading ability. The study is based on a qualitative method and five semistructured interviews with mathematics teachers and one language support teacher.The result shows there is a strong connection between the pupils' reading ability and their ability to manage text assignments in mathematics. A weak reading ability affects the pupil in a negative way when solving text assignments in mathematics due to wrong reading technique if the teacher is absent. It is not unusual that reading difficulties and mathematics difficulties coincide. The teacher's most important role in the learning process is to teach the pupils understanding about the reading technique in different ways and to give the pupils opportunity to get spoken texts.