From Obstacle to Opportunity : making reading meaningful in the classroom

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to learn how I as a teacher can work with reading in different ways to promote learning for students in upper secondary school. This is discussed with examples from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Randa Abdel-Fattah's Does My Head Look Big In This?. In this study, I found out that there are many factors that contribute to students' attitude towards reading and that affect their experience of a text. These factors consist of five emotions that affect reader response: assimilation, accommodation, sympathy, memories and identification, as well as four categorizing factors: age, gender, ethnicity and class.  Knowing these factors, we teachers have the tools to turn students' resistance to reading into something positive, and by doing this, we open up a myriad of learning opportunities through reading.