“Why Don’t Teachers Always Work with Reading Strategies?” : A study of preferred reading strategies among students and teachers of English in Swedish lower secondary school.

The questions asked in this empirical study is how teachers and students prefer to work with reading projects. It is asked which method they prefer to work with. 28 student informants have participated in the study that contained two questionnaires and a smaller reading project. They read two texts using two different approaches: one reading with no instructions other than to read the text and another reading with more thorough pre-, during, and post-reading assignments, such as discussions before and during the reading and a final individual written summary after the text was read. The results of the study showed that the majority of informants stated that they prefer more thorough pre-, during- and post-reading work in order to feel confident about their comprehension of what they have read. In addition, four teachers were interviewed for this study, and they all agree that literature in their classroom is important from several aspects. For example, they see greater vocabulary growth and more relaxed students when the students are reading. All four teachers use different strategies. Two of them focus on the pre-reading, one on the during-reading strategy while one works more with the post-reading strategy. What they all have in common is that they work regularly with reading and it is a big part of their lives outside of work as well and that is something they hope to pass on to their students, the freedom and joy of reading. This study discovered that a teacher must be willing to create reading projects that involve a lot of preparation and student discussions in order to increase their students’ reading comprehension.