What do future teachers read? A study of the teacher as reader through the book titles they bring up

Abstract

Nowadays, there are more and more findings of educational research that show that a reader teacher is necessary to educate readers at school. On the one hand, the personal relation that teachers have with reading exerts an influence on the kind of instructional reading practices they offer in their classroom. On the other hand, teachers´ beliefs on reading worth that they convey to their students are also connected to their own reading habits; so the reader and the educational person converge into the teacher. This work explores the potential embedded in the study of the last three books that future teachers declare they have read as an indicator of their own identity as readers. More than thousand preservice teachers of three public universities were
surveyed. The results reveal that these subjects are not closely involved in reading and that and they show an extrinsic motivation towards the reading; they are immature readers, they read best-sellers or fashionable books and writers and they basically read the compulsory readings at university. Their concept of respectable reading is analysed through the titles they bring up. Promoting better habits
towards reading is proposed as a pre-service teacher
education goal.