Introduction
1. Introduction
Magdalena Bobek, mag.
Helping learners become autonomous in reading is one of the main objectives in education today. Reading has recently become one of the greater challenges mainly due to all the technologies such as mobiles, smart phones, ipods, just to mention a few that enable learners to stay in almost constant contact with social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google and others. They have become frivolous diversions and sometimes even obstacles in the learning process deviating learners from successful learning already at a very young age. It seems that young learners and teenagers, have become addicted to these modern technologies and simply do not know how to approach reading or anything connected to it, as it all seems so boring compared to their ipods and mobile phones. Getting learners at this stage in life interested enough for them to do a simple reading task is a challenge in itself. Since learning also requires reading, it is obvious that reading literacy plays an important part in this process.
Before looking at possible ways of improving reading literacy, it is first and foremost important to understand the young learners ' perception of the world at this stage in life. At the age between thirteen and seventeen everything teenagers do, how they live, speak and breathe revolves around them. In order to get their attention and improve their interest in the curriculum, it is vital for teachers to find ways of boosting the teenagers ' interest in reading material. Perhaps the most important factor influencing a teenager ' s interest in reading is the reading material itself.
Material that offers little or nothing tangible to teenagers or their life experiences, will not serve as something they will embrace. On the other hand material that deals with common teenage problems and circumstances or a young person ' s struggle at achieving their goal in life, something with which teenagers can associate, is bound to capture their attention. If the material at hand is not completely connected to their ' schemas ' to use Cook ' s expression( 1997:86) referring to the knowledge of the world that the reader brings to the text, the teacher will have to use various teaching styles and methods as well as select and evaluate
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