Prague, Jan 26 (CTK) – One fifth of Czech children aged between six and 14 consider reading tiring and one quarter of schoolchildren consider it a duty assigned to them by teachers or parents, while half of them perceive reading as entertainment, according to a poll released yesterday.
“Answers that reading is not modern and cool were marginal among the children,” Vit Richter, director of the Librarianship Institute of the Czech National Library, said.
He said though the number of strong readers has decreased in the past decade and fewer books are read now, the decrease is not dramatic.
Richter said it is not true that Czech children do not read as is often said.
One fifth of children admitted that reading is tiring for them. If they do not manage the reading technique, they prefer the easier way of spending their leisure before television or a computer. Boys prefer playing games, girls Facebook. Czech children have a little experience with reading e-books. Tablets and mobiles are not used much for reading, the poll showed.
According to international comparisons, Czech home libraries are second largest in the world, after Israel. Adult Czechs are among the biggest readers.
Eighteen percent of Czechs do not read any book in a year, according to a Eurobarometer survey, compared with 59 percent of Portuguese, for instance.
