"Alla mysiga var de bumbibjörnarna" : Some Early Swedish Learners' Reading Strategies in English

Sammanfattning: Being a skilled reader makes it easier to learn a new language. It is important to teach students how the knowledge and use of reading strategies can facilitate learning. This study was made in a Swedish fourth grade class with eighteen participant pupils. They were asked to translate two texts from English into Swedish: one was a poem with nonsense words, and the other a prose text. The texts were taken from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll and The Garbage King by Elizabeth Laird. After this an interview was made with all of the pupils in pairs, where they were asked about their reading strategies normally and in this situation. The results found were that the reading strategies used were: likeness with their native language, previous vocabulary knowledge of the L2, syntactic knowledge, and guessing the meaning through the context. The result confirms previous research in that the pupils who liked reading and did so in their spare time, did better when it came to making syntactically correct translations.