“Book Dog and Astrid Lindgren”: A Project to Promote Reading Children’s Literature

Programmes to promote literacy by letting a child read aloud to a specially trained dog and its handler have become increasingly popular in many countries, above all in the USA and Britain, through an organization called R.E.A.D. (Reading Education Assistance Dogs). In Sweden, the word läshund (reading dog) was included in the list of new words for 2012 by the Swedish Academy. It is a method intended to increase reading enjoyment by letting children read to dogs. In the reading situation, the dog handler should be able to meet the children at the stage where they are in their reading development, and, with the help of the dog, give the support the child needs just then in order to make reading easier and associate it with something nice. This means that the children look forward expectantly to the reading exercises since the dog functions as a motivator. The dog gives security and serves as a reward while the dog handler, with the aid of the dog, can assist the child to a deeper understanding of texts. In later reading situations when the dog is not present, the memory of the dog can make reading and the reading situation calmer and more relaxed for the child.

Livia, eight years old, has just finished reading her first book, Mimmi and the Pup, by Ann Gomér (Mimmi och valpen, 2015).

“That was fun,” she says. “And the book was good!”

During the summer holidays, Livia has improved her reading together with the book dog Arabella. Roughly twenty minutes a day, Livia has read to Arabella about how Mimmi’s new neighbor has acquired a dog that he cannot look after. Livia is a great animal lover with a lot of empathy, and she was concerned, just like Mimmi in the story, by the way the neighbor kept the pup tied in the garden at night.

“There are people who get pets and then don’t bother about them just because they get tired and don’t think the animal is fun any longer,” said Livia. “If you have an animal you should look after it!”

When Mimmi is allowed to take care of the pup and the neighbor turns out to be nice, Livia smiles contentedly. In the last picture, Bonita the pup is lying in Mimmi’s bed and Livia can breathe out—both because the story had a happy ending and because, together with Arabella, she has begun to overcome her difficulties in reading. Now we are waiting for the second book in the Mimmi series, and in the meantime, we read Who Wants Sumpen? by Gun Jacobson (Vem vill ha Sumpen?, 2014)—a picture book published in aid of Hundstallet (The Dog Stable) and the dogs they take into care there. In the book, the dogs themselves talk about their lives, and I am convinced that Livia will be happy when she has finished reading her second book this summer because Sumpen and his friends come out well at the end.

When Livia started reading to Arabella, she read letter by letter—“ddddd ooooo ggggg”—and then she put the letters together—“dog”—and took a deep breath before she started on the next word. The reading went very slowly, and she held the covers of the book in a tight grip with both hands; however, she understood exactly what she was reading, and she was very careful not to drop any letter. She showed that she understood what she was reading by commenting on the action of the story in a reflecting way. The only word that Livia recognized visually as a group of characters on the first occasions was “mother,” but after just a couple of days, she could also read “pup” and several short words like “and” and “but” along with the names of the characters in the text, recognizing the shape of the words. Now she reads more phonically and recognizes even more words as visual groups of characters, which means that reading is faster...