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Denna studie är ett resultat av det samarbete som inleddes i maj 2020 genom Nätverket för erfarenhetsutbyte kring arbetsintegrerad lärarutbildning. Syftet är att undersöka hur den verksamhetsförlagda utbildningen genomförs i arbetsintegrerade lärarutbildningar vid svenska lärosäten.

Det empiriska underlaget utgörs av en enkät som kombinerats med uppföljande intervjuer och skriftlig kommunikation. Studien utgår från att det finns en lång tradition av motsättningar när det gäller hur utrymmet mellan praktik och teori ska fördelas i lärarutbildningarna. Undersökningen visar att det finns ett brett utbud av lösningar kring VFU inom arbetsintegrerade lärarutbildningar när det gäller form och i viss mån även innehåll. Ett rimligt antagande är att dessa skiftande upplägg bottnar i anpassningar till lokala behov. När det gäller examination av VFU uppger samtliga lärosäten att de bygger sin bedömning på information från en kombination av underlag. Efterfrågan på validering av VFU är mestadels låg eller obefintlig bland de lärosäten som ingår i studien. Anledningen förefaller vara att studenterna upplever momentet som meriterande och att denna bild är spridd mellan studentgrupper. En slutsats från denna studie är att utveckling av förutsättningar för arbetsintegrerade lärarutbildningar bör ske med förståelse för den mångfald av lokala anpassningar som lärosäten navigerar mellan för att uppfylla det konkreta målet att kunna erbjuda denna utbildningsform bland sina utbildningsprogram.  

Children’s and adolescents’ reading of longer connected text is decreasing in in many parts of the western world, including Sweden, leisure reading as well as school-related reading (Vinterek et al., 2020). Growing inequity among students’ opportunities to develop L2 reading literacy also highlights the compensatory objective of Swedish compulsory school. Concurrently, the Swedish school system, like many other, has moved in a direction of increased accountability for students, teachers, and school leaders. The intensified focus on short-term assessment and easily measurable results, e.g., in the form of more and earlier national tests and student grades, has made it even more of a challenge for professional teachers to make room for extensive reading practices and to focus on more long-term goals such as building students’ self-identity as readers. 

The purpose of this study, which is part of a larger project on reading practices in Swedish compulsory school, is therefore to investigate how a group of English teachers (L2) cope with these challenges in four different classrooms, situated in different socioeconomic contexts. More specifically, I look at what type of reading practices that these teachers initiate for their respective group of students, and in what way these classroom practices manage to strengthen students’ self-identity as readers of English. Theoretically, the study is framed by Self-determination theory (SDT) and the related notion of reading self-concept, defined as one’s sense of competence and the role ascribed to reading as a part of one’s personal identity. The analyses of the L2 reading practices are primarily based on audio-recorded observations of two classrooms in Grade 6 and two in Grade 9, with some contextual data from complementary teacher and student interviews. Preliminary results indicate that teachers are caught a in dilemma where they must navigate between two conflicting goals: taking shortcuts to prepare students for the national test or creating positive reading experiences that can build students’ long-term self-identity as L2 readers. To initiate and sustain reading practices that manage to negotiate between these goals, teachers need professional agency and self-determination to create classroom environments characterized by both control and autonomy support.

The results are of relevance to research on literacy instruction and motivation in general, and on L2 reading in particular. 

Biesta, G. (2017). Education, Measurement and the Professions: Reclaiming a space for democratic professionality in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(4), 315–330. 

Vinterek, M., Winberg, M., Tegmark, M., Alatalo, T., & Liberg, C. (2020). The decrease of school related reading in the Swedish compulsory school 2007–2017. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 66(1), 119-133.

Published sixteen years after the end of the Vietnam War, Robert

Olen Butler’s Pulitzer-winning short-story cycle A Good Scent from

a Strange Mountain (1992) is an imaginative attempt by a Euro-

American writer to come to terms with the consequences of the armed conflict

for the many thousands of Vietnamese refugees who emigrated to, and

settled in, the USA during and after the conflict. The stories dramatize the

internal and external conflicts that the predominantly Vietnamese-American

protagonists experience owing to their cultural and national relocation as firstgeneration

immigrants, or due to their cultural and ethnic hybridity as secondgeneration

immigrants. This essay aims to show how both the form and central

theme of the volume can be understood not only as a negotiation between

American and Vietnamese identities, but also as going beyond the compulsion

to identify self and other along national and ethnic lines. It will argue that

Butler’s text transcends national and ethnic determinations by imagining a

transcultural subjectivity, according to which characters can enjoy something

close to mutual understanding. As will be shown, this transcultural transcendence

takes place on different levels in the text: on the level of the characters,

on the level of the narrators, and on the level of the author. Thus, the text

itself can be seen as an example of transculturality in the sense that the author

 crosses cultural boundaries in order to imagine and narrate his stories from a

Vietnamese-American perspective.

Lärarens undervisning och engagemang är grundläggande för i vilken omfattningelever på mellan- och högstadiet läser sakprosa och skönlitteratur. Om elevernaska kunna uppnå en grundnivå i läsförståelse, måste grundskolan leva upp till sittkompensatoriska uppdrag. Läsning av sammanhängande text måste bli ett naturligtoch återkommande inslag i alla ämnen.

Läsförståelsen bland svenska grundskoleelever har enligt internationella kunskapsmätningar gradvis sjunkit sedan millennieskiftet. Trots en liten uppgång i 2015 års PISA-undersökning ligger resultaten för läsförståelse bland svenska 15-åringar en bra bit under 2000 och 2003 års nivåer. Vi vet också att likvärdigheten mellan elever såväl som skolor ökar, och att skolans socioekonomiska sammansättning har fått ökad betydelse för elevernas resultat. Men frågan är vad dagens grundskolor gör för att motverka denna trend? Samtidigt som vi vet att det bästa sättet att förbättra sin läsförmåga är att läsa mer råder stor okunskap om hur omfattande elevers läsning inom ramen för skolarbetet faktiskt är och hur läsundervisningen går till.  

För att besvara dessa frågor har jag tillsammans med kollegor på Högskolan Dalarna, Uppsala universitet och Umeå universitet påbörjat ett större forskningsprojekt som syftar till att utveckla mer kunskap om grundskolans läspraktiker i åk 6 och 9. Jag själv kommer särskilt undersöka den läsning och läsundervisning som sker på engelska och inom ramen för engelskämnet, sakprosa såväl som skönlitteratur.  I ett första steg håller jag på att gå igenom tidigare didaktisk forskning inom området läsundervisning på ett andra- eller främmande språk. I min presentation ger jag en kort sammanfattande rapport av vad jag hittills funnit av relevans i tidigare svensk och internationell forskning inom detta område. 

This is a study of the American writer Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried. Unlike previous O'Brien scholarship, which is either historical-biographical or formalistic, focusing on the contextual meaning or the literary merits of his narratives, this dissertation studies O'Brien's war narratives within a functional and communicative paradigm. It approaches the texts from the reader's point of view, bracketing the question of what they mean in order to focus on how they communicate. Taking its starting point in Wolfgang Iser's theory of narrative communication, the thesis looks specifically at what role the implied author of each text has created for his implied reader. The various narrative perspectives in the texts are identified and the reader's wandering viewpoint is analyzed as it moves among these perspectives during the reading process. Iser's inherently textual model is modified and supplemented by Mikhail Bakhtin's more socially oriented ideas on novelistic discourse, especially his concepts of heteroglossia and the dialogic text. The textual analyses show that O'Brien's communicative approach changes from a reliance on biographical and historical material in the first narrative, toward a keener sensitivity to how the human mind experiences and reacts to such historical events in the second and third. A comparison shows a general development from a relatively narrow and passibe reader's role to a more open and demanding one where the reader is expected to take part more actively in the construction of meaning. Thus the focus in the texts shifts from the war experience itself to a self-reflexive examination of how such an experience can be communicated.

The article addresses the didactic questions of what, why and how aspects of culture and history can be—and should be, it is argued—an integral part of all foreign and second language teaching  and learning. In particular, it is argued that the study of literary fiction within tertiary foreign  language education can function as a gateway for students to develop not only a stronger interest  in and knowledge of cultural history, but also a better understanding of the complexity of historical  representation, public memory and self-identity. Drawing on current theories of narrative discourse  and historical representation, as well as the experience of having taught a foreign language course  in Sweden dealing with fictional representations of culturally important periods in US history, the  paper shows how a personal engagement with these “little narratives,” to use Lyotard’s term, can  enhance foreign language students’ understanding of, not only important historical events and  periods in the shaping of contemporary American culture, but also of the importance of textual  representation and cultural “grand narratives” in the shaping of collective identities and personal  subjectivities. 

During the past decade we have seen a clear trend of decreasing amounts of leisure-time as well as school-related reading among adolescents, in Sweden (Statens medieråd, 2021; Vinterek et al., 2020) and in other parts of the western world (Clark & Travainen-Goff, 2020; Twenge et al., 2018). From previous studies we also know that, whereas students’ leisure-time reading is mainly driven by their intrinsic or autonomous motivation (Cox & Guthrie, 2001; Troyer et al., 2018; Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997), their school-related reading amount is dependent on more external, instruction-related factors such as scheduled reading time and access to a wider selection of texts (Ivey & Broddus, 2001), factors which, in turn, have the potential to increase students’ more autonomous motivation as they develop a stronger reading self-concept (Tegmark et al., 2022).

However, what types of reading activities that actually take place in Swedish compulsory school and how they relate to different types of instructional practices are still largely unexplored areas of research. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to better understand the relation between teachers’ instructional practice and students’ reading activities. Is it possible to find patterns in teachers’ instructional practice that can help us understand why more reading is done in some classrooms compared to others? The goal is not to find the best instructional practice that makes students read the most, but to identify common denominators (instruction related factors) among those teachers who manage to make their students read more than one whole page of connected text per class. Similarly, we seek to find out what characterizes those instructional practices where students do not read at all. What do the students do to learn instead of reading, and what is it in the teacher’s instructional practice that seems to be missing in order for reading of connected text to take place?

The study is theoretically framed by Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2020) and its differentiation between different types of autonomous (self-determined) and controlled motivation, which, in turn, are dependent on the degree to which the social environment (such as the classroom) manages to fulfill the basic psychological needs of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. 

The study is conducted through a mixed-methods design including large-scale classroom observations in Grades 6 and 9 (59 lessons, 14 schools), which have been analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our results suggest that even though the relationship between teachers’ instructional practice and students’ reading activities is complex and context dependent, it is possible to identify certain key features that cannot be ignored if the current trend of decreased school reading is to be turned around. The results are discussed in relation to recent developments in both policy and practice in the Nordic countries. 

This article looks at how cultural and national subject positions are constructed and negotiated in Frank McCourt’s award-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996). The memoir has enjoyed tremendous commercial and critical success, especially in America, where it not only won two of the most prestigious literary prizes in the category of autobiography, but also managed to stay on the New York Times bestseller list for more two years, and three years after its first publication it had sold over two million copies in the US alone. However, critical voices were also raised against the memoir, especially from Irish readers who resented the way in which the expatriate McCourt commercializes their past misery.

The memoir thus clearly has the power either to make the reader feel secure and confident in his or her own cultural identity, or to cause him or her to react very strongly to the identity positions that it constructs. But which are these subject positions that are constructed and negotiated in the memoir? Where, how, and by whom are they constructed? This article will show how the memoir is built around a number of binary oppositions between what is constructed as “Irish” and “American” subject positions. Whereas the “Irish” position is characterized by religious intolerance, social determinism, selfish pride and personal guilt, the “American” position is characterized by religious pluralism, social mobility, communal solidarity and personal fulfilment. Other binary oppositions that the memoir constructs between the “Irish” and the “American” positions are wet vs. dry, cold vs. warm, tradition vs. popular culture, past suffering vs. future opportunities, sexual inhibition vs. sexual freedom, narrowness vs. openness, authority vs. liberty, failure vs. success, and so on.

The construction of these opposite subject positions will be analysed by looking at the different “truth regimes” that the protagonist is exposed to during his childhood and adolescence. Drawing on Foucault’s claim that a subject can only recognize itself, and others, within a specific regime of truth, the article will show how McCourt’s memoir operates on two narrative levels simultaneously. At the story level the protagonist has to abandon his “Irish” subject positions in order to recognize himself as an “American”. At the discourse level it is the reader who has to make the same identification with the “American” position and to accept the “American” regime of truth as constructed by McCourt the author in order to appreciate the memoir.  The analysis will be further guided by Judith Butler’s claim that “telling the truth about oneself comes at a price, and the price of that telling is the suspension of a critical relation to the truth regime in which one lives” (Giving an Account of Oneself pp. 121-122). The article will thus argue that the enormous success that the memoir has enjoyed in the United States is, to a large extent, dependent on its uncritical acceptance of an “American” regime of truth.

Enligt Högskolelagen ska all utbildning vid svenska lärosäten vila på vetenskaplig grund och beprövad erfarenhet. Sedan 2010 stipulerar Skollagen att samma sak gäller för den verksamhet som bedrivs i barn- och ungdomsskolan. Denna statliga styrning har satt press på landets lärarutbildningar att utbilda lärare med god vetenskaplig kompetens för att kunna ta till sig tidigare forskning, genomföra egna vetenskapliga undersökningar samt bedriva undervisning som vilar på vetenskaplig grund. Likaså har gradvis mer resurser satsats på forskning inom skolans och förskolans område för att det som lärs ut på lärarutbildningarna ska vara forskningsbaserat, och nyligen inrättades ett nytt statligt Skolforskningsinstitut med uppgift att sammanställa forskningsresultat som kan bidra till att lärare och förskollärare använder sig av vetenskapligt underbyggda metoder och arbetssätt.

Men hur vet vi att den svenska lärarutbildningen i sig vilar på vetenskaplig grund? Hur vet vi att det sätt vi utbildar lärare på är det bästa? Även om lärarutbildningen har reformerats ett flertal gånger under de senaste decennierna, så har grundstrukturen och omfattningen förblivit ungefär desamma. Och även om forskningen för lärarutbildningen har ökat, är forskningen om den svenska lärarutbildningen mycket begränsad, framför allt i ett internationellt perspektiv. Denna presentation syftar till att presentera ett urval av internationell lärarutbildningsforskning och reflektera över vilka lärdomar vår svenska lärarutbildning kan dra från denna forskning i vår ambition att bygga utbildningar som i sig kan sägas vila på vetenskaplig grund.

Background: Reading amount is decisive for individual students’ academic success as well as for the general strength of democratic societies. Still, the amount of both leisure-time and school-related reading is decreasing. To reverse this trend, more knowledge of what drives students’ school reading is needed. Methods: Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the study is based on structured interviews with 259 students in Grades 6 and 9 from 14 different schools. Descriptive statistical analyses were made to map students’ perceptions of themselves as readers and their school-related reading practices, and to find out what regulates students’ motivation for in-class reading. Results: Although students express a strong will to become good readers, our data indicate that students are mainly driven by controlled motivation for their school-related reading; autonomous motivation was only expressed by a minority of students in Grade 6. What would make students read more are mainly text and instruction related factors such as more interesting texts and more time allocated to reading. Conclusions: Our results point to a great potential for more in-class reading across the curriculum, reading sessions that need to be regularly scheduled using carefully selected texts. In line with SDT, our findings highlight the importance of fulfilling students’ need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy in order for them to develop more self-determined behavior, such as leisure-time reading – which in turn will boost their reading self-concept.

Trots vetskapen om läsningens betydelse och den sjunkande likvärdigheten i elevers läsförmåga, har kunskapen om elevers faktiska läsande sett till omfattning varit näst intill obefintlig. Det kan tyckas märkligt då det satsats mångmiljonbelopp på att återkommande mäta elevernas läsförmåga för att konstatera att den sviktar. Vi vet att barn och ungas bok- och tidningsläsande på fritiden minskat. Men hur ser det ut i den obligatoriska skolan? Läser elever längre texter i skolan, eller tas det för givet?

The purpose of this study is to develop understanding of the relation be-tween instructional practices and students’ reading amount. As part of alarger mixed-methods study of reading practices across the curriculum inSwedish compulsory school, a selection of 14 classes from Grades 6 and 9were observed over a total of 59 lessons. The data generated were codedand analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The resultsreveal a great variation in teachers’ instructional practices which is shownto have both direct and more indirect consequences for students’ readingamount. By combining the results from quantitative and qualitative analy-ses in the light of Self-Determination Theory, the study shows that mostreading is done in classrooms where teachers manage to fulfill students’need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy while maintaining class-room structure and ensuring lesson time for reading. The findings are dis-cussed considering previous research on instructional practices in relationto students’ reading motivation and reading amount, adding to our under-standing of what makes students read in everyday classrooms. Limitationsof the study, directions for further research, and implications for practiceare also discussed.

In this paper we will report some results from a project (funded by the Swedish Research Council) with an aim to develop knowledge of existing reading practices to better understand what kind of support students receive at school to develop reading skills. In this we lean on earlier research that stresses the importance of many hours of diverse reading practice to develop necessary reading skills to be an active part of a democratic society. 

Data were collected 2017 and relate to the findings of a similar study conducted in 2007. The main research questions addressed in this paper are:

• To what extent do students in grade 6 and 9 read continuous text, nonfiction as well fiction, as part of their school work?
• What differences in the amount of reading between grade 6 and 9, among boys and girls respectively, can be detected?
• What can be noticed about changes in students´ reading at school during the last decade?

In the year 2017 data were collected by a questionnaire, distributed to schools with grade 6 and grade 9 in a mid-Swedish region, the same was done in 2007 for all students in grade 5 and 8 in one of Sweden’s largest municipalities.  Students were asked to estimate how many pages of continuous text, fiction and non-fiction, they had read in class during the day of the questionnaire. For the 2017 study we also asked about the amount of text read out of school as some kind of school assignment (e.g. homework). In total 1526 (2007) and 3289 (2017) answers remained after data cleaning.

We found that reading at school has declined substantially the last decade (e.g. 22% had read less than one page in 2007, 30% in 2017). An even higher percentage of students don’t read any pages of continuous school texts in grade 9 compared to grade 6, and girls still read more than boys. We also found that the amount of text read as part of the students’ schoolwork out of school (2017) is lower than for text read at school. These patterns are the same for non-fiction as well as for fiction.  

In the next part of the study we are taking a closer look at the actual reading practices in a selection of these classrooms trying to understand the results. There is also a need for more studies of the amount of text read at school.

This paper reports on some preliminary results from the project “To read or not to read: A study of reading practices in compulsory school” funded by the Swedish Research Council. The aim of the project is to develop knowledge of existing reading practices and to find out what kind of teaching that promotes such practices in a way that enables students to learn from reading. The decline in students’ reading literacy is something that concerns and worries many European and other Western countries. But surprisingly it is difficult to find large scale studies focusing on how much students read at school. To be a good reader one needs to practice (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Campell et al., 2001); it takes more than 5000 hours of reading to achieve a well-functioning reading capacity (Lundberg & Herrlin, 2005). To learn from text one needs to be able to read a longer text (Topping et al., 2007; Merisuo-Storm & Soininen, 2014). Prior research in the field further shows that it is important for students to read different types of texts (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003) and thus develop vocabulary and reading skills in many subjects (see, for example, Biemiller, 2001).The amount of reading, at school or at leisure, correlates positively with reading ability (Anderson et al., 1988; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Taylor et al., 990). In our study we therefore are interested in the total amount of coherent and continuous text students read during an average school day in all their subjects, with a particular focus on reading habits in Swedish (L1), English (L2), Chemistry and History. We also want to find out how the amount of reading correlates with the students’ self-assessed motivation for their school-initiated reading activities. In the first part of the project there is a predominantly quantitative focus in which we seek to find out the extent to which students read continuous prose texts – fictional as well as non-fictional – as part of their everyday school work, and how their reading is related to different types of motivation. The second part of the project has a predominantly qualitative focus where a limited number of groups will be selected for a series of closer classroom studies of teachers as well as students through observations, interviews and questionnaires in order to find out what characterizes the reading practices of these schools and classes. This paper will report on some preliminary results from the first part of the project where the following research questions are to be answered:

• To what extent do students in years 6 and 9 read continuous prose text—fiction as well as nonfiction— as part of their school work?
• What kind of motivation do students express for reading nonfiction and fiction texts in different school subjects?
• What is the nature of the relationship between students’ reading motivation and the extent of their reading in school?
• What differences in the interest of reading and in the reading habits among females and males, between school years 6 and 9, and between schools can be detected?

The overall framework of the study is the didactic triangle and the meeting between the teacher, the student and the subject matter in terms of meaning making and reading activities that occur in this meeting (Uljens, 1997; Hudson & Meier, 2011; Liberg et.al. 2002.) We also draw on motivation theories that stress the importance of constructing classroom practices that support student reading motivation by fulfilling the basic needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2008; De Naeghel et al, 2014)  

Läsförmågan hos elever i den svenska grundskolan är långt under vad den var 20 år sedan, samtidigt som fritidsläsandet fortsätter att minska. Skolan har därför ett viktigt kompensatoriskt uppdrag då vi vet att det krävs rikligt med läsning för att bli en god läsare (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003). Elever behöver också läsa olika typer av texter för att utveckla ordförrådet inom olika ämnen (Biemiller, 2001). Dessutom måste elever kunna läsa längre texter för att utveckla kunskap genom läsning (Topping et al., 2007; Merisuo-Storm & Soininen, 2014). Forskning visar också att längden läsning i skolan och på fritiden korrelerar positivt med läsförmågan (Taylor et al., 1990).

Studien utgår från självbestämmandeteorin (SDT) vilken betonar att typen av motivation är viktigare än mängden motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Ju mer autonomt reglerad elevers motivation är, desto bättre är förutsättningarna för att de ska vilja läser mer. Forskning har visat på ett rekursivt samband mellan autonom motivation och synen på den egna läsförmågan (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000).

Syftet är att visa på relationen mellan hur mycket eleverna läser och deras motivation till läsning, attityd till läsning och synen på den egna läsförmågan. Följande frågor är i fokus:

*Hur många sidor sammanhängande text läser elever i årskurs 6 och 9 i svenska, engelska, historia och kemi under en dag i skolan?

*Vad är elevernas generella attityd till läsning?

*Vilken motivation uttrycker elever för läsning av skönlitteratur och sakprosa i skolan?

*Hur ser eleverna på sin egen läsförmåga och skolans såväl som sina egna läspraktiker?

Analyserna bygger på data från 3408 webbaserade elevenkäter från 144 grundskolor i 18 kommuner. Dessutom genomfördes 194 strukturerade elevintervjuer i sex klasser valda utifrån grad av motivation och mängden skolrelaterad läsning.

Resultatet visar att elever i årskurs 6 läser mer i skolan än elever i årskurs 9 och att elever i årskurs 6 visar en högre grad av inre motivation än elever i årskurs 9. Elever i årskurs 6 har också en mer positiv attityd till läsning av såväl skönlitterär som sakprosatext än elever i årskurs 9. Analyser pågår gällande relationen mellan hur mycket eleverna läser och deras motivation till läsning i de olika ämnena. Preliminära resultat pekar mot att det finns en potential i elevernas förhållande till läsning som skolan skulle kunna ta tillvara i än högre grad.

Studiens storskaliga ansats med både kvantitativa och kvalitativa data bidrar med ny kunskap om skolans läspraktiker o

Even though the importance of extensive reading practice is well documented, as are students’ changing leisure-time reading habits, knowledge of how much students read at school is still limited. Therefore, this study investigates how many pages of continuous text, nonfiction as well as fiction, students in middle (Grades 4–6) and lower secondary (Grades 7–9) school read during an ordinary school day. Comparing data from two large-scale surveys, in 2007 and 2017, our analyses indicate that the proportion of students who read one full page or more has decreased significantly. More students in middle school compared to lower secondary still read nonfiction, whereas the reading of fiction is now equally low. We conclude that the growing achievement gap among Swedish students on reading literacy tests is mirrored in the widening divide between students who still read extensively at school and those who do not read at all.

As leisure-time reading among adolescents declines in the western world, stakeholders try to increase students’ motivation for school-related reading. We examine the relationship of students’ autonomous and controlled reading motivation with their amount and experiences of school-related reading in four school subjects, controlling for students’ attitudes toward the school subjects and general attitudes toward reading. Questionnaire data were collected from 3308 students in Grades 6 and 9 at 144 schools in Sweden. Multiple linear regression indicates that students’ attitudes toward the subject are more important predictors of reading amount than their reading motivation. Motivation type was primarily related to students’ affective experiences of the reading, and only weakly related to their amount of school-related reading. Results suggest that the relationship between motivation and school-related reading differ from voluntary leisure-time reading. The study thus complements previous research which primarily has focused on the role of students’ motivation for their amount of leisure-time reading.