Textlösa böcker : Ett möjligt verktyg för läsfrämjande

Sammanfattning: Reading among young people is decreasing, which is worrying, considering that good reading skills are crucial for personal development as well as for understanding the modern society. The objective of the present study has been to explore the practice of using textless books to favour reading, since research shows that there are some advantages in doing so. To that purpose, seven interviews were conducted with librarians, educators and a creativity coach who all had previous experience with working with textless books, i.e., books where the readers use their own imagination to navigate through the narrative with the aid of the pictures in the book, often in a social context. The study is based on qualitative research, where interview transcriptions were used for identifying themes, further analysed using a model for reading motivation by the researcher Linda Gambrell. The results show that there are some advantages with working with textless books, not least the many ways to use them. The study’s informants support previous research that have shown that textless books favour reading development and increases vocabulary. Some of the specific advantages according to the informants are that such books can evoke imagination, that the readers are in some sense ‘equal’, since the demands on them are low, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to read the books, and everybody succeeds in reading, and that the books seem to encourage further reading. The conclusions of the study are that textless books can motivate further reading and thu