"I Would Rather Watch a Movie" : An Investigation of Students’ Attitudes Towards Reading Fiction in the EFL Classroom Compared to Reading as a Leisure Activity

Sammanfattning

Reading and especially reading fiction has become a debated topic in a Swedish schoolcontext. Opinions on whether young adolescents should read fiction in school or not aredivided as reading fiction is a time consuming activity, while it is also difficult to measurewhat the students learn from reading fiction in a school system with a focus on measurablevalues. At the same time studies have shown that there are many benefits associated withreading fiction, not only to develop one’s reading ability but also to meet new worlds and toreflect on one’s opinions and beliefs. This study investigated students’ attitudes towardreading fiction in the EFL classroom compared to reading English fiction as a leisure activity.The theoretical framework is based on Felski’s ideas on engagement of reading. The methodproceeds from a survey with students at upper secondary school and a focus group interviewwith three students. These methods complemented each other by both enabling the researcherto gain access to a large number of students’ opinions while also being able to dig deeper intothe opinions through the focus group interview. The results demonstrate that many of theinterviewed students had negative attitudes towards reading fiction in English, especially as aleisure activity. However, some benefits, such as improving language skills and gainingdeeper knowledge and perspectives of the world and people, were identified by the students.