Promoting reading 1
both politics and religion, but primarily from sp
ortsmen and women in general and football players in particular. More boys than girls named sportsmen and women among their role models. Many of the interviewees declared that reading tips from known sportsmen and women would encourage them to read. The conclusion of the study is that parents’ important role as reading role models gives support to reading promotion programmes that target families, but that one should also not underestimate the method of using celebrities in efforts to influence the young to read. Reading and gender That boys generally demonstrate lower levels of literacy than girls has been established in a number of major studies, as have differences between boys/men and girls/women in terms of reading habits. A compilation of the research on the subject commissioned by the National Literacy Trust showed that girls in the OECD countries not only do better on tests that measure reading ability, they are also more inclined to enjoy reading, read more frequently, think positively about reading and perceive themselves as readers (Clark & Burke 2012). In Sweden, we have been able to confirm that the gender differences in literacy are virtually identical regardless of social class. Reading researcher Karin Taube (2013) related this to boys reading less in their free time, as a result of a less positive attitude to reading. Women in Sweden read more than men – especially if we look at the reading of fiction. Litteraturutredningen (The enquiry into literature) (2012) noted that in 2007, the proportion of women in the population who read fiction at least once per week was almost twice that of men, and for younger women the figure was almost three times that of younger men. In the OECD countries, on average just over half (52 per cent) of boys aged 15 years spend time reading for enjoyment, compared with almost three quarters (72 per cent) of girls who say that they read for enjoyment (OECD 2010). How can the difference between the reading habits of boys and girls be explained? The question is complex, but broadly speaking it is possible to discern two types of explanations. Among the more controversial/contested explanations are presumed biologically conditioned differences in “learning styles”. Looking at reading habits from a social perspective has achieved wider acceptance. The gap between the reading habits of boys and girls has been explained by the idea that we are socialised into different reading roles. The term socialisation here is understood as the process by which individuals incorporate their environment’s standards/culture; a process that occurs largely unconsciously. In this field, reading habits can be looked at on the basis of social constructs of masculine and feminine identity. The reading habits of boys, for example, have been understood as the product of a social pressure on boys to adapt to masculine identities, in combination with the stereotypical conceptions of reading as a “feminine” occupation. Lena Kåreland (2009) has observed that children are socialised into gender-related attitudes to reading fiction. A researcher who has placed special emphasis on the gender aspect of reading is Gunilla Molloy (2007). Both Kåreland and Molloy use the term culture of resistance in describing the boys’ reluctance to read. This concept derives from Paul Willis’s ethnographic study Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs (1977), which describes how a number of school boys from working class back51