Abstract:

The paper addresses the topic of a rapid decrease in pupils’ reading enthusiasm in comparison with the past, and follows up on the study Understanding Children´s Development through Research of their Preconceptions about Literacy Phenomena (ICERI 2017, Seville, Spain).

We will present the methodological basis of the VEGA research project No. 1/0455/18 Research and Development of Reading Enthusiasm with Younger School-Age Learners done by the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sports of the Slovak Republic. Its main objective is an empirical research into the factors influencing the "reading enthusiasm and reading interest" of elementary school pupils, and discovering the indicators for the decrease in their reading enthusiasm with their increasing age. The key research method will be measuring pupils' attitudes towards reading and acquiring opinions and experiences of teachers. Therefore, the preparatory phase uses interviews with pupils to obtain valid semantic categories.

In this study, we present the results of the preparatory phase of the research. We have implemented flexible micro-interviews with pupil groups for an initial research. The purpose of the interview survey was to create categories for the subsequent quantitative research. The personal categories included "pupils - readers" and "pupils - non-readers". The interviews helped to identify content categories for the research: "pupil as a reader", "social context of reading and reading enthusiasm" and "reader preferences".

The results of the interviews indicate that the topic brought several grounded theories:
1. teachers are not able to reliably identify "readers" among pupils;
2. “pupils - non-readers" read texts which they do not speak about during their lessons, and that's why their teachers cannot identify them,
3. readers' preferences show that "pupils - readers" mainly read adventure books, detective stories, girls' novels, and fantasy stories, while the "pupils - non-readers" mainly read texts from the internet for their homework, text messages, jokes, and books on computers.
4. It turned out that both groups of pupils read texts, which adults do not consider typical for their age.

We consider this stage to be a cardinal point for setting up a subsequent quantitative research, and at the same time this stage brought original findings that will be formulated into a theory embedded in the text of this study.

Keywords:

Reading enthusiasm, reading interest, pupil as a reader, empirical research, flexible micro-interviews.