Approaches to Motivate Students to Read English Literature in the Upper Secondary Classroom

Abstract: Reading literature has always been a big part of developing language skills, critical thinkingand imaginative thinking. However, research show that adolescents in today’s society tend toread less literature both inside and outside of the classroom. The Swedish National Agency forEducation emphasizes the importance of reading written texts in the subject English, yet thesyllabi do not offer specific recommendations or guidelines. This thesis paper aims toinvestigate how English teachers choose literature in the EFL classroom to motivate studentsto read and how they structure teaching around these books to motivate their students to read.For this qualitative research four interviews with open-ended questions were held and the datashows that teachers are struggling to understand what literary texts they are expected to use.Thus, the teachers have developed multiple strategies to manage demotivated students in theclassroom and the most common way to teach about literature was to use fiction as the mainsource. The most common way to motivate students to read is to have an open conversationwith the students why reading is important and providing them with a good study technique tofeel less stressed.