Abstract:

Nowadays, teachers often say their students do not read books. They have trouble motivating them to pick up a book and often the teachers in literature classes tend to struggle when it comes to their students enjoying reading.

As part of our research, we conducted a questionnaire and distributed it to Czech students at the age 11-13 at a secondary school. We were trying to discover whether these students like reading, read regularly at home (and how many books they are able to read in some time period) and are able to identify with the characters in books.

Firstly, our aim was to discover whether there is a positive relationship to reading among today’s students and coming from that, whether the complaints in the teacher’s community have some truth to them. We believe that choosing the right book for our students is a key in their motivation to read. So secondly, we also wanted to determine what genres students like so we – and possibly other teachers – could use this information in order to make our literature classes as motivational as possible, resulting in our students enjoying reading.

In this text we share the information we discovered during our research and connect the data to the overall situation in education, specifically literature.

Keywords:

Reading, students, secondary school, motivation, literature classes, books.