Promoting reading 1
Chapter 9. Concluding remarks and recommendations
Reading promotion can be understood as an activity for increasing reading motivation, broadening reading interests, and improving attitudes to reading. In this knowledge review, the methods for achieving these have been sorted into the categories early reading stimulation, reading role models, readers’ advisory services and book presentations, social reading, summer reading programmes and availability/accessibility. The first chapter of this book narrows down the concept of reading promotion. It also provides an introduction to the state of the research and in what ways research can be helpful in the planning, evaluation and improvement of reading promotion programmes and activities. The book’s second chapter presents some key concepts. While reading attitude refers to the feelings and ideas of the individual about reading, and reading interest refers to preferences in terms of genres and subjects, etc., reading motivation is about an internal condition that results in the individual wanting to read. The factors essential to motivating children and young people to read include the perceived relevance of the literature to their own lives, access to a broad range of reading material, plenty of time for reading, freedom of choice in the selection of reading material, and the opportunity for social interaction around what has been read. This chapter concludes that the teaching of reading in Swedish schools – as it is largely practised according to the Swedish National Agency for Education’s report from 2007 – is contrary to what the research says about reading motivation on virtually every point. Added to this is that research on reading outside school has demonstrated a positive correlation between reading ability and access to books in the home; that children who own books read more frequently and get more out of it than children who do not; that children who come from homes where reading is valued are more inclined to evolve into readers; that reading for pleasure is strongly influenced by relationships between teachers and children, as well as between children and their families. Together with a large number of studies indicating that parents and the home environment are crucial for children’s reading, a picture begins to emerge in Sweden of socio-cultural factors being allowed to determine to a very high degree who become readers and who do not. The teaching of reading in school is often positioned as distinct from reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure has been defined as reading of one’s own free will, for one’s own enjoyment or satisfaction. The concept occurs most often in reading promotion contexts. Reading for pleasure is also a fairly well-established concept within the international research. The term reading for pleasure denotes voluntary reading, for one’s own pleasure or enjoyment. The second chapter of the book puts forward a couple of arguments in favour of using the alternative term voluntary reading – understood as reading done of one’s own free will, and out of one’s own interests. The term “reading for pleasure” risks reducing the purpose of reading to primarily a matter of enjoyment, which in turn provides only a weak argument for reading in competition with other 99