”Faktaböcker får man bara läsa när man forskar”. En studie i barns självvalda läsning

Sammanfattning: The aim of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the factors of children’s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3–4 children in each group. We have used two theories for our study, Aidan Chambers’ “reading circle” and the Swedish researchers Kristian Wåhlin’s and Maj Asplund Carlsson’s investigation “Children’s three libraries”. The three libraries are: the Family library, the Friends library and the Society library. We chose these theories because they can help us to understand children’s reading in a context and different social processes. During our study it became clear that children, who do not like to read, read non-fiction more often. Children who like to read and read more often also search for information on the Internet more often.Earlier investigations show that children choose non-fiction books in first place. That is not what we have seen in our study. The literature that we used for this study shows that there are many different voices about what children should read and what they read. In our study we discovered an attitude towards non-fiction books; it should not be “real books”. The grown-ups attitude towards the children what they should read and what they read, influence of course the children what they choose for their reading.