READING: BETWEEN COMPULSORY READING AND FREE CHOICE
READING: BETWEEN COMPULSORY READING AND FREE CHOICE

Summary/Abstract: Education is the most important activity for the development of a society, the identity and survival of a certain nation. Mother tongue and literature is, in pre-university education, in all education systems, the most important subject. This subject contributes to acquiring the reading habit, it fosters consistency, cultivates taste, develops empathy. Therefore, the organisation of the curriculum for this subject, apart from its narrow specialist meaning, has a wider social significance. The most important segment of teaching mother tongue and literature is reading, which highlights the importance of how much reading students do and what they read, as well as the possibility of their participation in selecting reading materials. This paper deals first with compulsory and optional (additional) literary texts – those which are prescribed curriculum and those which are part of the author’s free choice in junior textbooks regarding their availability in the textbooks, and subsequently, it deals with the real use of optional texts in class, as well as the criteria applied when selecting these texts. In this paper, by conducting a survey involving 255 junior teachers, it was examined: a) to what extent teachers rely on the texts that the authors of junior textbooks select for optional reading; b) which criteria they consider to be the most important while they choose additional texts for reading in class; c) which are the main features of the texts they select in the first place. For the purpose of creating a questionnaire, the curriculum for junior classes was analysed, and so was the content of all the approved reading textbooks for this age in the school year 2017/2018. The results of the survey show that junior teachers use the offered additional texts in junior textbooks to a large degree, that the most important criteria when choosing the additional texts are the students’ reception, their interests and sensibilities. The least important criteria are those related to the teacher’s reading taste and interpretative skills, or his or her competence to present a text in an adequate way in class, which suggests that teachers erroneously exclude themselves as important factors in the selection of texts. When introducing texts independently, teachers have similar expectations to those regarding the texts which are the prescribed curriculum.

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