Austria

Special Reading Initiatives

In Austria, reading literacy is a fundamental component of primary and general education. The Education Ministry’s Reading promotion initiative (Leseförderung—Literacy!) aims to enhance all students’ reading motivation and reading skills, effectively support weak readers, and develop a comprehensive reading culture in schools with support from teaching staff. The initiative builds on developmental processes taking place in classrooms and schools, whereby schools institute individual and needs-oriented measures to promote reading, taking into account girls’ and boys’ different motivations and reading habits, as well as the needs of students whose first language is not German. This initiative is supported by in-service teacher training programs, materials, and brochures for parents (distributed during school registration); materials for teachers; and school projects. The initiative includes obligatory implementation of a group screening for reading in the third and fifth grades using the Salzburger Lese-Screening diagnostic tool, which measures basal reading skills to identify potential reading weaknesses.^d

Today, family literacy is considered the fundamental key to young people’s reading skills, and international studies such as PIRLS have shown the importance of reading socialization in the family.¹⁰ In December 2016, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results again confirmed the lack of reading skills of young Austrian people, highlighting the systemic problem that, in Austria, reading skills and educational opportunities for children are closely linked to the socioeconomic status of their families. The Austrian Book Club^e has focused on family literacy projects in the past, and thus has been able to launch a Family Literacy Initiative with the help of its network of volunteers and contacts with families in Austria.

Austria currently has several other family literacy activities, though in general these are single projects and not networked, and therefore probably have neither lasting nor systematic impact. Many reading promotion projects and campaigns are implemented with a high degree of commitment, but have the same problem: these projects tend to encourage already motivated children, and they do not consider or support children with reading problems. In 2011, the Ministry of Education began preliminary research on family literacy and held a roundtable with experts in the field of family literacy.

Another measure to improve reading achievement is a coordination center for reading that was created to support primary school teachers and schools and offer nationwide programs. As a consequence of the PISA 2003 results, the Ministry founded the competence and advisory center Koordinationsstelle: Lesen to address issues related to reading. The center is staffed by a group of delegates from all nine Austrian provinces who were nominated by University Colleges of Teacher Education.