Promoting reading 1
des the showing of film versions, theatrical dram
atisations and staged readings of the book. The One Book programme has become widespread in, among others, the USA, Canada, and UK. As a result of this renewed interest in social reading on a large scale, one can add yet another aspect – reading as a way of building community – to reading as an individually transformative, educative, existential, therapeutic, creative and even civilising experience. A goal of OBOC programmes can also be to bolster the status of local literature. A commonly occurring variant of the OBOC model is One City One Book. OBOC programmes may also cover entire regions or provinces, for example the province of Norrbotten in Norrbotten läser. Another form of social reading is the author visit. Author visits for the purpose of reading promotion occur in the form of individual events and also as part of various types of reading promotion programmes and projects, both within Sweden and abroad. Each year, approximately 2,500 author visits are conducted in Swedish classrooms, among other things to stimulate interest in reading in order to improve reading ability. According to the National Library of Sweden’s statistics, 3,200 author visits occurred at Sweden’s public libraries in 2014. Adults appear to be the most common target group for author visits, which are usually made by authors of fiction. The research has shown that author visits in Swedish schools are generally one-off events: the author comes to a lesson, reads from and talks about his/her books, answers questions and that is the end of it. Some visits are more ambitious and include extensive preparations as well as subsequent arrangements. It has been observed that the students’ work with a novel in the context of an author visit generated various types of conversations about, for example, text interpretation, connections to one’s own experiences, political and aesthetic questions, etc., – in short, elements that justify deeming such author visits as a form of social reading. The seventh chapter of this book is devoted to what are termed summer reading programmes. Summer Learning Loss is the name given to the phenomenon that students tend to fall behind with their learning during the summer holidays and students from families of lower socio-economic status fall behind even more – which over time creates ever-greater gaps. Summer Reading Programmes are often regarded as a means of combating these effects. At Swedish public libraries, summer reading programmes have gone under the name “the Summer Book”. The Summer Book has been defined as a reading promotion method where children are asked to read a number of books over the summer and then rewarded if they succeed. The current national programme Sommarboken (The Summer Book) has departed from the method of reporting and rewards, and instead placed the emphasis on book discussions in various forms. Abroad, summer reading programmes often follow a kind of read-and-report structure, where the children get to report on what they have read, orally or in writing. Often the children are required to read a certain number of books, with some form of reward in sight. In the research, programmes of this type have come to be called Incentive Programmes. The British Summer Reading Challenge, which involves thousands of libraries in the UK, entails children being required to read at least six books during the summer holidays and then being rewarded for their efforts. A number of international investigations have reported that summer reading programmes help to increase reading, and in view of the fact that such programmes are often designed in such a way that the participants are required to read a considerable 110