An Investigation of Elementary Students'' Interests in Reading in Ping-Tung County

• Main Authors: Lin Mei-Chung, 林美鐘
• Other Authors: Liu Ming-Zong
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/92583437107790551416

碩士 === 國立屏東師範學院 === 國民教育研究所 === 90 === Reading is one of the important activities that people obtain information and it also affect how they build their values of life. Reading performance is vitally important to overall achievements of learning. In these years, the government realizes the importance of reading and greatly promote reading activity. Besides improving people’s reading atmosphere, we government would like to develop students’ reading ability in the 9-year compulsory education in integration. The study aims at 647 middle and senior primary students (3rd-6th grades) sampled out of 14 primary schools in Ping-Tung. The purpose is to analyze these students’ attitudes, favors, and habits of leisure reading, to know students’ leisure reading requirement and interests, and to investigate the reasons that influence students’ leisure reading behaviors. The major findings of this study include： 1、Students’ leisure reading attitudes: a majority of the elementary students in Ping-Tung County rated high on overall reading efficacy and reading motivation, and through further analysis, different students’ genders, ages, and school sizes affect students’ leisure reading attitudes. But there’s no influence by their living environment and family economic situation. 2、Students’ leisure reading favors: most elementary students in Ping-Tung County like to watch TV, listen to music, play computer games and go on the Internet; they prefer reading matters with comic strips, funny pictures, and then books with both pictures and literary compositions. They have more interests in the knowledge subjects and interesting circumstances in the books than in the design of the front cover or the beautiful printings of the books. Nowadays, the e-media is quite available, and they also show more interests in reading on the Internet than reading through books. But they leisure reading through e-media is mainly to entertain themselves or spend their leisure time, less to learn or to obtain knowledge. There are few differences in students’ choosing reading matters’ sources; their former three reading matters choices are ghosts and monsters story, funny story, and fairy story. 3、Students’ leisure reading matters’ sources: most leisure books are bought by students’ parents, and then they buy them with their allowance or borrow them from school library. (About 39% of the students would be willing to buy the leisure books they like with their own money.) Students get new books information from TV, Internet, or their classmates. 90% of them are not satisfied with the amount of collections in their school or community library, and they think the collections should be enlarged in these places, especially books like comic books, picture books, e-journals, and CD books. More than 78% students have contacted with reading on the Internet and read about e-journals, and CD books, and about 77% of them indicate they love that. (All the students in the study have a small class library in their class and the books exchanging frequency is about once a semester.) 4、Students’ leisure reading habits: students like to read at home; directed by their parents or teachers, or they read themselves. Most students can’t solve the problems they meet when reading. From the study, we can describe students’ reading circumstances: over 60% students like to read alone, sitting on the chair and slowly read one book a time; occasionally they take notes or read out. 5、Students’ leisure reading behaviors: students spend most time watching TV at home. They read more on holidays, but fewer when exams coming. Moreover, this study proposed some suggestions to students, parents, schoolteachers, primary school administrations, education authorities, and children reading publishers. Through the efforts, it is hoped that children would be guided into having better reading habits; thus educational reform policy will be effectively carried out and promote we people’s quality.