Läsförståelse : En jämförelse av två läromedel och ett nationellt prov

Sammanfattning: In the last few years there have been many reports on students lack of reading comprehension in Sweden. Reading comprehension is crucial in today’s society. It is as central for school as it is for being able to be a part of society and work. The aim of the study is to compare and examine whether there is correspondence between two reading comprehension text books and the national test of reading comprehension in 2012. Through text analysis and theories of readability, question types and reading strategies the comparison was made. The text analysis is performed in accordance with Hellspong (2001) and Hellspong och Ledin (1997) model for text analysis, where the language formation is studied. The following research questions are answered: Which similarities and differences are found regarding the readability of the narrative texts and the factual texts? Which similarities and differences are found regarding the type of questions that are asked in relation to the narrative texts and to the factual texts? Which reading strategies are tested in the national test and which reading strategies are practiced through the teaching materials? The results of the analysis show both similarities and differences between the national test and the textbooks. The texts in the national test are less easily read while the textbooks consist of more types of questions and enables practice of more reading strategies. In the textbooks multiple reading strategies was found to be required in order to answer the questions, whilst the national test generally only needed one strategy for most questions. In this way partial correspondence is found between the textbooks and the national test. However, the textbooks are useful for practicing reading comprehension since they have a lot more type of questions and reading strategies, than the national test. A conclusion up for discussion is that the textbooks leave it to the teacher to provide practice of more complicated and longer texts since the texts in the national tests has shown to be more complicated to read.