Modern teaching methods and the curricular reform for Slovene language have thoroughly transformed literature instruction by placing the student, their interests, and their capacity to establish a dialogue with the text at the center. All this and more is encompassed within communicative language teaching. The central method is the school interpretation of a literary text, consisting of several phases. The most critical phase is the teacher's aloud, experiential, semantically appropriate, emotionally expressive, and aesthetic reading of the literary text, referred to as interpretative reading. The teacher's interpretative reading serves as a bridge to the students' aesthetic experience and the establishment of communication or dialogue between the students and the text. It is a demanding speech activity that requires the teacher's prior preparation, and under no circumstances should the reading be left to improvisation. The teacher must consider prosodic features and apply them appropriately to specific parts of the text. By doing so, the teacher becomes a reading role model for the students, consequently fostering reading motivation and further classroom engagement. In the theoretical framework, we defined literature instruction with an emphasis on modern teaching methods, integrating school interpretation and the reading of literary texts. We examined interpretative reading, the teacher's role, and the teacher's preparation within literature pedagogy. In the empirical section, using an original reading comprehension and assessment test, we investigated the impact of interpretative versus neutral reading on the memorization and comprehension of a selected text among second-grade primary school students. Additionally, using an original questionnaire, we assessed their subjective opinions regarding the teacher's reading. The study is based on a mixed-methods research approach, employing a non-probability convenience sample. The study included 134 second-grade students from the Osrednjeslovenska region during the 2025/26 school year. Our research indicates that the teacher's interpretive reading does not have a direct, statistically significant impact on improving students' text memorization and comprehension, either immediately after reading or after a ten-day period. Nonetheless, students who listened to the teacher's interpretive reading achieved marginally higher scores and subjectively evaluated the reading with positive feedback. Furthermore, the findings indicate that while students express a desire for teachers to read interpretively, high-quality neutral reading of literary texts remains sufficient for them.
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