| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
This study aims to investigate whether school libraries in Norwegian primary schools facilitate reading in the EFL classroom. In recent years, digital tools in Norwegian schools have becoming increasingly popular, and seemingly less attention has been paid to the availability of physical materials in school libraries, especially regarding EFL materials.
To get an overview of the state of affairs, the study investigated English literature content in the libraries, the school libraries` budgets, and their degree of collaboration between English teachers and librarians. A mixed methods approach was used, by conducting an online survey in addition to two semi structured interviews. 29 primary school librarians participated in the survey. The survey contained 60 questions, including sub questions concerning collaboration, literature content, budgets in addition to some initial questions on who the participants were, their background, education etc. The interviews included one interview with a school librarian and two English teachers. The interview with the librarian followed the same line of inquiry as the survey but had an additional tour of the library regarding content. The interview with the teachers also covered the same topics as the survey, in addition to questions about the teachers general approach to teach reading in the EFL classroom.
The results show that there were large deviations between the different school libraries when it comes to English content, but most of the libraries had insufficient content to cater to the various interests and linguistic proficiencies of several hundred pupils. The data from both the digital survey and the interviews also showed that there was very little collaboration amongst the English teachers and the librarians, the collaboration that did exist was closely tied to the form tutor position and the Norwegian subject. The study further found indications of English teachers relying heavily on digital resources as result of lack of collaboration, cost, and convenience. The findings also show that the librarians face challenges with providing enough English materials due to insufficient funding. On average, these school librarians received a budget of 20 000 pr year.
These findings contradict the Norwegian Governments’ intentions towards strengthening the school libraries as democratic institutions. The school libraries main foundation is to provide equality of opportunities for all the pupils and with this being an important resource for democracy building. Almost half of the master thesis in Norway are now written in English (Svarstad, 2022), and research show that the students at the start of their studies lack the proficiency to read and write academic English (Hellekjær, 2019. p. 190). As the ability to read longer text are closely related to deep reading and voluntary reading (Dahl & Mangen, 2015, Krashen, 2004), the equality principle for higher education is at risk. If the municipalities and individual school owners continue to neglect the school libraries and their English sections, success in higher education might be just for the few, and not for all in the future. | |