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.

 The aim of this study was to describe the experiences and thoughts among midwives when encountering same sex couples at the maternity ward. Further, the aim was to explore the midwives attitudes towards education about special needs among same sex couples and their thoughts about contents and design of such education. The study had a descriptive design using a qualitative method. The data was collected through interviews with 10 midwives in February 2009. The midwives worked at two different maternity wards.

Background:When the patient is critically ill the family is in a vulnerable position. The nurse's role is to support and help the family to find meaning in the difficult situation and to provide realistic hope. Balancing between the patient's and the family's needs is difficult. Knowledge about how nurses experience difficulties in the interaction with family is required in order to grant good care too critically ill patients and their family-members.Aim:To describe nurses' perceived difficulties in the interaction with family-members of critically ill patients.Method:The study is a qualitative literature-based study based on qualitative research. Results: The analysis resulted in four main themes; difficult disunion, environmental constraints, interpersonal difficulties and communicative difficulties.

My purpose in this paper is to study teachers' work in reading and writing in primary school and special school. I want to find out if they use the same methods, strategies and materials to help students learn to read and write. I will find out the answer to my purpose by performing two qualitative observation and two qualitative interviews. Lundberg (2010) is the researcher I relate to during my study. Through observation, I see how teachers work with students in the classroom during a lesson in the Swedish language. During the interviews, I received answers to how teachers work with language, the materials, methods and strategies they use. I found out that teachers use specific strategies when they help their students. They use a work material that is tailored to curriculum in Swedish language and it is based on the phonics method. .

The purpose of the literature study was to describe older people´s difficulties and attitudes to take several drugs. Literature has been sought in two large databases and included literature is selected, quality assessed and analyzed, based on the study purpose and questions. The authors conducted a descriptive literature review of qualitative and quantitative articles. Difficulties to access different types of pharmaceutical packaging, or to remember when to take their medicines are difficulties the elderly encounter. Cultural and socioeconomic differences become apparent.

In primary school reading-books in Swedish language is something that students come across early in school and have done ever since the 1800s. After World War II there have been major changes in society. 1962 there was a school reform where the school turned into a nine-year system of compulsory education. That is why it is interesting to see what reading books contain with regard to notions of children, family and class and how the developments have been from the 1950s until the present time. This study aims to analyze and compare the different aspects of how notions of children, family and class are produced in the reading books for primary school for pupils in third grade, between 1950 and 2009.The research questions were:What are the notions of children, family and class in the reading-books?What differences/similarities exist in the reading books from the 1950s to the  recent decades?What could be the reason?I have chosen to apply qualitative text analysis originating in idea analysis.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

The aim of this study was to examine ways in which High School Students approach academic writing. Both discursive and critical-analytical levels in 21 PM-texts and 14 investigating literary essays were analyzed through a genre theoretical and sociocultural framework in order to widen the understanding of students? usage of explicit textual and interpersonal markers as well as their techniques of writing abstracts. The results showed that nearly 25 percent of the putative abstracts consisted of sampled and reshaped text sequences. The majority of these were on the other hand results of a creative process in which the students reshaped utterances from different sources.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the reading promotion project called ?A book?s all sides?, together with the activities of the book-event, can stimulate young people?s reading. The research questions are: How do the project leaders plan and organize activities for the book-event? How do the young people respond to the activities at the book-event? Do the young people get interested in the book which is presented at the book-event? Which connections between Vygotskij?s theory and the activities can be found in the book-event? The theoretical approach is based on Lev Vygotskij?s socio-cultural theory. To answer my research questions I have implemented four qualitative interviews and two interviews with the adult activity leaders and observed a book-event in the classroom.

This exam essay will look at dyslexia, dyscalculia and the connections that may exist between these two phenomena. My purpose, from the beginning, was to investigate if there might be any connections between dyslexia and dyscalculia, or if the consequences that appear as a result of dyslexia, might lead to problems and difficulties in mathematics.   I found it very hard to find literature that deal with dyscalculia, both as a subject of its own and together with dyslexia. Therefore, I was more or less forced to focus on difficulties in mathematics as a result from dyslexia.   From what I have found, dyslexia and dyscalculia cannot be connected, at least not without more research on the subject. Two consequences; an impaired short-term memory and also an impaired spatial ability are both common, both for persons with dyslexia and for persons with dyscalculia. Other than these, there are no connections, apart from the difficulties in mathematics that are directly, or indirectly, caused by dyslexia..

 The aim of this thesis is to examine men's attitudes towards literature, and how social norms affect their book reading, in order to contribute to the knowledge of why men's book reading is decreasing. This is realized through a discourse analysis of literature recommendations in men's lifestyle magazines.Two magazines, King of Sweden and Magazine Café, are examined through critical discourse analysis. Theories of discourse are combined with theories of gender to explore how gender stereotypes affect men's reading habits.The analysis shows that ideals of masculinity have a great influence on the book recommendations. Social norms, associated with gender, also seem to have significance to whether or not a book is considered suitable for men to read. These are, inter alia, norms of heterosexuality and violence.

The study highlights teachers´ perceptions of creative writing as part of learning processes in the subject of Swedish, based on creative activities. The background to this study comes from the curriculum that describes opportunities to experience different kinds of knowledge. Creative activities in various forms and the ability to one´s own creativity is emphasized. The empirical data in this study is collected through qualitative interviews with four practicing teachers. The result shows that there are two different views according to creative writing as a text creation.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine how librarians perceive the importance of staff reading groups in helping to make fiction more accessible to adult users of public libraries. The study also examines how librarians perceive the learning processes in such groups, and what these learning processes involve and how they appear. The empirical data was acquired via observations of four staff reading groups and interviews with seven public librarians who took part in the groups. In part, the empirical data is interpreted by means of Lena Wilhelmsson?s analytical tool, which deals with changes of perspective within an organised group.

 This study examines the way Swedish students in Upper Secondary School respond to two excerpts from a classic Swedish novel. The paper?s aim is both to give an overview over some of the theoretical concepts concerning the field of reader-response criticism, and to describe and analyse what the students experience in their first meeting with an older text. The background to my interest is the many studies showing that young readers regard reading of fiction in school as boring. By using the method of written reading responses I want to contribute to a deeper understanding of how an older text can be received, understood and engage its readers.

The purpose of this master thesis is to show how a chosen actor in form of the Swedish union organization IF Metall (the Swedish union for metal- and industrial workers) works with pro-reading activities. The project being scrutinized is the Read to me dad-project which aims at fathers who are not used to reading activities within the LO-group (the Swedish Trade Union Confederation). The methods used are interviews and literary studies. The theoretical background of my discussion is based on three education ideals. The neo-humanist ideal emphasizes the personal improvement through literature.