The aim of this dissertation is to examine how teachers perceive the reading goals stated in the syllabus for English, and how they work towards the goals for year 9 that emphasize reading comprehension and reading strategies. Reading comprehension in English among students in year 9 had weakened in the period in-between the latest national survey of the Swedish school-system NU03, which was carried out in 2003, and the national survey done in 1992. The period in-between these two surveys saw the introduction of a new curriculum, a new syllabus and a new grading system. Thus questions arise about the role and status of the new syllabus, and how the teachers perceive the goals for reading and choose to work towards these. Through the use of qualitative interviews, this paper investigates how three teachers at a secondary school in the south of Sweden interpret the goals to attain, and how they work on increasing the reading comprehension and improving the reading strategies of their students.

The aim of this study is to investigate how teachers working in grades 1–3 of secondary school think that reading comprehension should be taught so that the pupils will be able to reach the learning goals in grade 3. The study applies a qualitative method whereby three teachers who worked in the early years of school each took part in a semi- structured interview. An interview guide was used as a data collection instrument and the interviews were documented by audio recording. Collected data were then analysed for meaning content with a phenomenographic approach. The result shows that the most common perception of the concept of reading comprehension is the ability to read between the lines and to retell a text in one’s own words. The view of reading comprehension was also seen to affect the way the teaching is done, and a shared view was found in the way of talking about different texts and asking questions to give the pupils practice in metacognition while reading. The result also shows that the teachers’ differing educational background influences the methods they use when training reading strategies, and the view of reading comprehension also affects how they think assessment should be done.

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