Lika möjligheter till ett livslångt lärande?: en studie av svensklärares förhållningssätt till användningen av skönlitteratur och skolbibliotek

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the view of Swedish language teachers on the role of fiction and of school libraries within the compulsory school’s teaching of Swedish of form 6-9. The questions to be answered are: • What part do Swedish language teachers (hereafter called teachers) think fiction is playing regarding the pupils inclination to read and reading promotion? • What is the attitude of teachers regarding the function of fiction in the Swedish subject? • What do teachers consider being the role of the school library in education, and can this be related to the local school library resources? To answer the questions a questionnaire was sent out to thirty-five teachers. Four qualitative interviews were also carried out among the fourteen teachers that answered the questionnaire. The empirical material has been analyzed with the use of the following theoretical models: A. Chamber’s The Reading Circle; models of understanding the Swedish subject by L-G Malmgren and S. Thorson, and D. Loertscher’s taxonomy of school libraries, modified by L. Limberg. Within the study we have found that the teachers imply that reading promotion is important, in spite of this we found an instrumental view on the reading of fiction. The main views on the role of fiction were that fiction partly serves as a means for practice in Swedish, partly as a means for the pupil’s self-identification. We also found that only a few school libraries function as a pedagogical resource in a problem-based teaching, and that it was mostly teachers in schools where the library did have this function, that fully understood its meaning.