Textinnehållets betydelse för läsförståelsen : En komparativ studie av flickor och pojkar i åk 7

Sammanfattning: Research reports as PISA and PIRLS show that reading comprehension among Swedish students have deteriorated in recent years and that girls have better reading comprehension than boys. The basis for this study is Maj-Gun Johansson's reading comprehension test done during the four years between the years 2005-2008 in the seventh grade in a municipality in Sweden. The main purpose of this study is to examine reading literacy in terms of the influence of content and form of texts viewed from a gender perspective. The study is divided into two parts. The first part is a survey on local reading comprehension compared with results from a similar national text. The second part examines the texts where the students had the lowest result, and the texts with highest differences in comparison between girls and boys. The results show that the most difficult text for both girls and boys was a factual text in which the content had no links to students' everyday lives and containing mathematical symbols. The form of the text made it more difficult to read when it contained difficult words, long sentences and was written in the passive form. The text had neither narration nor causal words. A literary text with two female characters showed the highest difference between girls' and boys' reading comprehension. The result indicates advantage to the girls. The result also indicates that although the form of the text was relatively simple, the text content and the identification factor plays a greater role for the boys in reading comprehension. From a gender perspective considered boys were more affected by the text content than its form.