Mid Sweden University

This study examines older students’ attitudes towards being read to in the classroom, with a focus on reading literacy and reading motivation. The examined students are in year 7-9, and a total of 31 students participated in the study. The study consists of a survey and a number of observations during my own read-aloud sessions with the students during a period of five weeks. The results and discussion-part of this essay shows that a majority of the students have positive attitudes to being read to in the classroom, and a significant part of the students prefer being read to instead of silent reading. The results also show that students with better reading comprehension tend to prefer silent reading, while students with poorer reading comprehension more often prefer being read to. A variation in teaching methods in the literature lessons, with a mix of silent reading and reading aloud, seems to be most beneficial to include all students. Moreover, the observations indicated that most students enjoyed being read to, but that they sometimes tended to drift away and loose concentration, which might affect the reading comprehension negatively. Therefore, I concluded that having discussions about the book during the reading aloud was important in order to keep the students attentive.