Tone Pavček’s thought “[i]f we don't read, we will disappear” has been used many times before but still hits the mark. Reading is not important only at individual level; by reading texts in Slovene we also keep Slovenian culture and language alive. For an individual, however, reading can present a short break, an escape to virtual reality, where a person is alone with a book, thinks about and with it. Reading at young age stimulates thinking, develops children’s cognitive abilities, and, lastly, helps them with transition to the adulthood. Available to all people, adults and children, in the “modern era” are many visually more attractive things than reading to keep us busy in our free time. This could mean there is simply no time for reading, but that is not the case or at least it should not be. Parents should know how to distribute the playtime, time spent on technological devices and reading, and first and foremost they should read to children already early on in their childhood and with that encourage them to read themselves.
The Master’s Thesis has two parts. In the first, theoretical part, reading, family reading, reading in school, reading as a socio-cultural process, motivation for reading, and factors which have impact on reading habits are described. In the empirical part the results gathered with the help of survey questionnaire about reading habits are presented. The obtained results were processed in SPSS software for statistical analysis. The research is based on answers from 51 pupils of primary schools in the Upper Savinja Valley and 55 pupils of a primary school in Ljubljana. We came to the conclusion that rural children read more; they evaluate books they read in their literature class and for their family reading as more interesting. The analysis has shown no differences between rural and urban children when it comes to their opinion on difficulty of the books they read in school. There are, however, differences between pupils’ opinions of the teacher’s adjustment of the tasks and texts; a higher percentage of rural children think their teacher adjusts the texts and tasks according to their capabilities. The majority of children prefer to read books they choose. We have noted that a larger part of rural children in comparison to urban children reads at home alongside their parents and also a bigger part of rural children talks with their parents about what they have read.
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