The Reader and Reading Culture from the Perspective of Student Teachers

Abstract

This study aimed at discovering the characteristics of non/traditional readers that can be used to formulate a typology and identify students’ attitudes towards reading for pleasure. It also deals with the social context influencing students’ reading culture. The questionnaire survey was conducted on 381 students at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava. The results showed that students who read for more than one hour a day prefer to read books in paper form, including textbooks, over reading electronic books, multimedia texts or playing on computers and consider themselves traditional readers. Non-traditional readers use critical thinking methods to understand texts and prefer a multimedia format for texts when reading for pleasure over playing computer games, reading e-books, and reading paper-based books. The study also points to the growing importance of the evolving multimedia reading culture in the era of the 4.0 Industrial Revolution.