Promoting reading 1
Karner Smidt pointed out that librarians often tr
y to find such a third alternative. Maj Klasson (1991) differentiates between the market model, the conservator model and the participatory model or interaction model. In her thesis, Skönlitteraturens budbärare (Fiction’s messenger) (2010), Annelie Lind draws a distinction between a demand-driven, a public education, and a dialogue and conversation-oriented approach. The tension between providing what is being demanded versus broadening borrowers’ reading can be bridged through the dialogue between the librarian and the borrower, Lind asserts. Nina Frid (2012) reflects on how such a third, dialogue-oriented mediator role means that the mediator “meets the reader on the basis of the reader’s perspective and needs, but uses his or her skills and literary knowledge as a strength”. Reading for pleasure or voluntary reading According to a report from the Swedish National Agency for Education (2007), the school’s teaching of reading and writing is dominated by formal drilling in skills. This is despite the fact that the curriculum and course syllabuses for Swedish and Swedish as a second language emphasise that learning should take place in meaningful contexts, and that language development should always be linked to content. According to this report, teaching carried out in accordance with the curriculum has been shown to improve students’ results in reading tests. That there is a risk of limiting reading to a matter of improving test results has been raised by the American secondary school teacher Kelly Gallagher who, in an acclaimed book entitled Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It (2009) claimed that through its one-sided focus on test results, schools are engaged in a kind of systematic murder of the desire to read. As a consequence of this “murder”, new groups emerge of aliterate individuals, i.e. people who can in fact read, but very rarely do. Reading promotion is partly about reaching those who could be described as aliterate in Gallagher’s sense of the word, i.e. the literate who rarely or never read. According to Gallagher, the factors that contribute to the murder of students’ reading enjoyment include schools ignoring the importance of students’ recreational reading. The teaching of reading in schools is often positioned as distinct from reading for pleasure. The term reading for pleasure or pleasure reading is widely used in reading promotion contexts, and has, in the research, a number of rough equivalents. Some related concepts are voluntary reading or free voluntary reading, independent reading, leisure reading or recreational reading, and ludic reading. In the study Lost in a book: the psychology of reading for pleasure (1988), Victor Nell uses the term ludic reading (from the Latin ludo meaning to play/playful) to mean pleasurable reading that you are absorbed in for its own sake. Reading researcher Stephen Krashen (2004, 2011) uses the term Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) as the designation for extensive reading that is done voluntarily. On assignment from the UK reading promotion organisation, the National Literacy Trust, researchers Christina Clark and Kate Rumbold (2006) wrote a useful overview of the research concerning reading for pleasure. They define reading for pleasure as reading of one’s own free will, for one’s own enjoyment or satisfaction. This term also includes reading that is started on someone else’s behest, but which is then pursued voluntarily. Thus, the term reading for pleasure says something about the goal or purpose of the 20