Browsing by Author "Lindroos, Sanna"

The aim of the study was to investigate how reading interest and reading joy is encouraged in preschools. The studies central questions were: Is the literature available to the children; if yes then in what way? How does the preschool work with literature? What are the preschools’ goals with their literature-work? What are the teachers own attitudes towards reading and literature? The data in this study were collected by qualitative interview with an open interview structure. The sample consists of three interviews with preschool teachers in Finnish-Swedish preschools in Helsinki. The results showed a clear lack of knowledge when it comes to reading interest and the importance of it. The term reading interest was in the first hand associated with learning to read and the reading development instead of the experiences and feelings involved in the reading. The teachers were more prone to associate reading joy with the children’s experiences involved in reading and the teachers reading aloud for the kids. Another interesting result was that the teachers prioritized the reading and saw it as an important part of the curriculum. Reading was thus not only an activity during naptime. Even if encouraging activities did occur, the teachers were not able to connect the activities directly to the development of reading interest. This indicates that the encouraging of reading interest does not happen deliberately. It would be important to raise the teacher’s awareness of the advantages of reading interest and teach them how to implant it in their work.