Flerspråkiga elevers läsförståelse på svenska. Om lässtrategier och läsutveckling på mellanstadiet

Multilingual students’ Swedish reading comprehension: Reading strategies and reading development in middle school

The overall aim of this thesis is to highlight the significance of reading strategies in developing multilingual middle-school students’ Swedish reading comprehension. Reading strategies are considered from teaching, reading development and individual perspectives, and this compilation thesis comprises an introductory chapter and three articles. The three empirical studies are based on material collected at a school where around 95% of students are multilingual. Overall, a Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach was taken. The first substudy focuses on the teaching of reading strategies in three different subjects through observations of two multilingual classrooms as well as teacher interviews. The second substudy examines students’ reading development over two years, and its relation to their self-reported use of reading strategies. The third substudy investigates the reading comprehension of eight multilingual students and their reflections on the use of reading strategies. The studied teachers have been inspired by the Reciprocal Teaching model, but the results indicate that these strategies (summarizing, predicting, clarifying, and questioning) are not always the ones students need in their own reading. In individual reading situations, students successfully tackled the vocabulary problems that arose when they read subject content by rereading sentences or paragraphs or drawing on their existing knowledge. Nevertheless, some students experienced difficulties comprehending the overall text content.