Reading culture of third and fourth class high school students

Abstract

The printed book and traditional literacy, on which our societies have based since the Gutenberg revolution, are increasingly being replaced today by electronic screens and digital literacy. The changes that have taken place in all aspects of life in the last few decades are also reflected in school teaching and students' reading culture. It is well known that books are written for someone to read and that literature is concretized and realized only thanks to the mediating experience of those who read a literary work. We were interested in the reading culture of the students of the third and fourth grade of the general grammar school, because we believe that they are active readers with a built-in reading taste. The aim of this paper is to analyze the reading culture of third and fourth grade high school students in schools belonging to the city of East Sarajevo. With a questionnaire designed for research purposes, we measured several indicators that indicate the level of reading culture. The results of the research suggest that students are generally interested in reading, that they still value the printed book and that they read mostly aesthetically valuable books, ie. that the level of reading culture can be considered satisfactory. Also, the results indicate that the interest in reading is more pronounced among female students and students with better school performance (especially in Serbian language).