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Strategier för bättre läsförståelse hos ungdomar på gymnasiet
Start date: Aug 22, 2016, End date: Aug 21, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Nobel Upper Secondary School is a large vocational school with a very high proportion of young people who have Swedish as a second language , especially now when we receive more asylum applicants than ever before. Several of our students are unaccompanied minors, others come from non-academic homes. This has lead to a large number of students with reading and writing difficulties.The poor reading comprehension have several causes such as too little reading experience, dyslexia or second language factors, but no matter what the reasons are, these students need a comprehensive and systematic training to improve their reading comprehension and thereby increase their chances to enter and complete a secondary education. This is necessary in order to be able to access further studies or work in the future. Reading comprehension is undoubtedly indispensable in order to fully participate in a democratic society.Because of the fact that many students at Nobelgymnasiet have reading and writing difficulties and/or Swedish as a second language, we decided in the autumn of 2013 to work more focused to increase the reading comprehension among our students. Two of the school's lead teachers, Ingegerd Norder and Susanne Mellerskog, have studied current research in the field and have held several lectures to all teachers at Nobelgymnasiet on how to work with reading strategies in all school subjects. They have also written a Teacher's Guide on the topic in order for all teachers to apply the methods on their own teaching. Nobelgymnasiet has worked on increasing the reading comprehension of students for two years now, but we need to intensify and systematize this work so that all teachers reach a consensus on how to improve students’ reading skills in all classrooms. The purpose of this project is therefore to extend the competence of our school when it comes to knowledge about how older teenagers can improve their reading comprehension. Sweden is not at the forefront when it comes to reading strategies in comparison with many other countries, and the efforts that are currently made in Sweden are primarily addressed to younger children at primary level. Materials and methods intended for high school and secondary school are unfortunately very limited. Nobelgymnasiet need to find good examples from other schools, both in and outside Sweden, on how such work can be carried out.Our teachers, Susanne Mellerskog and Ingegerd Norder are invited to hold a seminar and a workshop on reading comprehension strategies for older children at the conference in Tallinn. The theme of the conference is "Empowering the Teacher of Tomorrow" and its purpose is to highlight and discuss the key competences of the future teachers. Reading comprehension is definitely one such key competences, not least in view of the fact that Sweden's results when it comes to reading comprehension have gone down in international studies in recent years (cf PISA and PIRLS). Nobelgymnasiet’s teachers will, during their seminar, share the methods they use in their own classrooms in Karlstad and will then initiate a professional learning network for teachers from different countries. How do other countries and schools work with older children’s reading comprehension? Their experience will hopefully give Nobelgymnasiet input on how to proceed in their own reading comprehension work. Today's society enables a professional learning that extends far beyond Sweden’s borders, which increases the chances of a broader and more nuanced knowledge of methods and learning strategies for the classroom. The conference in Tallinn is an opportunity for Nobelgymnasiet to show how we work with reading strategies and to make connections that can help us move forward in our own work. The experience from the Tallinn conference will form the starting point for:1. Teacher Learning Communities at Nobelgymnasiet during 2016/2017 with a focus on reading strategies for older teenagers.2. Blog posts that discuss and analyze the reading comprehension teaching in secondary education.In summary, the objective of this project is to improve our students’ reading comprehension (and thereby their learning) at Nobelgymnasiet, by raising awareness and understanding of how teachers in every classroom can and should work with reading comprehension strategies.

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