Reading Habits in School

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VIN07516 Monika Vinterek Reading Habits in School Do students read full bodies of text? Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education, AARE Conference in Fremantle, Australia 25 th - 29 th November, 2007 PhD Monika Vinterek Monika.vinterek@educ.umu.se Department of Teacher Education in Swedish and Social Sciences, Umeå University, Sweden Abstract This paper is about reading habits among students in the Swedish Nine-Year Compulsory School. Results from a study with focus on coherent reading of various sorts of classroom texts (textbooks, newspapers, texts downloaded from the Internet, etc) are presented. By ”coherent” is meant full bodies of text. All schools in a one of Sweden’s largest municipalities participated in a survey. 1526 students in grades five and eight answered a questionnaire. In the questionnaire, queries concerning the reading of fiction where kept separate from other types of reading material. The results of this study indicate that students receive little training in the reading of coherent texts in school. The main result shows that more that 20 % of the students in grade 5 and about 30 % in grade eight fail to read a single coherent page of non fiction text as part of their schoolwork during a normal school day and that more than 50 % of the students read less than two pages such text a day. Only a few students are reading a large amount of coherent text. The results are discussed in the light of the good but declining reading results among Swedish students in international comparison. 1 VIN07516 Monika Vinterek Introduction and theoretical perspectives Traditionally most texts at school have been non fiction but investigations about reading habits in a school context have focused on fiction to a large extent. There are a number of studies of reading habits which

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