Motivations, Materials, and Means: Teachers’ Attitudes to Literature Use in Nordic Lower Secondary Schools

This study aims to reveal how Nordic lower secondary language arts teachers motivate and describe their literature instruction. It investigates what motivations for literature instruction teachers appeal to, what literary materials they use, and by what instructional means and methods they teach literature. An online questionnaire was completed by 701 teachers from a random sample of schools across the Nordic countries. Analyses showed that teachers valued using literature for various reasons, although using literature to develop students’ reading comprehension and linguistic skills were prioritised. Across all five countries, the reading of narrative texts was favoured. However, genre preferences varied by country: contemporary short stories were significantly more frequently read in Norway, Denmark, and Finland than in Sweden and Iceland, while young adult novels were significantly more commonly read in Denmark than in the other four countries. The most common instructional practices included letting students answer text-based questions and discussing literary texts. A key finding of the study is that literature reading in Nordic schools seems to be a matter of reading instruction rather than literature instruction. Thus, while different types of skills are emphasised, less attention is given to literary readings.