The purpose of this paper is to present, as a reference for reading education within Japan, reports on different aspects of actual reading education within the United Kingdom. More specifically, the paper consists of two investigative reports. The first is an outline of a nationwide survey of reading conducted by the National Literacy Trust. According to that survey, four books a month represents a boundary level in promoting liking for reading and positive impressions of reading. Moreover, reading enjoyment influences children's reading abilities. The second report presents data obtained from interviews with 21 children attending English boarding schools. One particularly noteworthy aspect of the data is the range of activities for reading education devised at the schools, such as encouragement through a ‘reading hero’ award, peer reading together with an adult, the creation of reading space from converted double-decker, and combinations of reading and creative writing activities.

This paper examines the policies of school libraries within Sweden and recent trends in book-reading activities in order to obtain some suggestions for promoting book reading among children and youth within Japan. In the 2010 revision of Sweden's Education Act, every school is required to provide access to a school library. However, as there are no explicit definitions of school library or access to school libraries, relevant statistics vary according to the definitions used when data collected. While the Royal Library of Sweden evaluates facilities, such as the number of books and staff, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate assesses school libraries in terms of their functionality. Both government promotions of book-reading and municipal support for school libraries can be understood as securing children's educational rights. These findings are discussed in the context of school libraries and promoting book-reading within Japan.

This study seeks to analyze the rhetorical patterns within English textbooks for junior high-schools. Rhetorical patterns refer to the structure of connections, or links, between sentences within a text, and previous studies have identified up to seven basic rhetorical patterns within general expository texts. Accordingly, they are considered to be an essential factor in assessing whether a text is easy to understand. Moreover, some empirical studies, that have investigated the effects of different rhetorical patterns on reader comprehensibility, report that certain rhetorical patterns can facilitate readers in recalling the meanings of a text more accurately than other patterns. Based on a framework of rhetorical patterns, twelve units from two distinct themes were selected and analyzed from six authorized English textbooks for seventh graders, which were revised in 2012 with the implementation of new course study guidelines. The analysis results indicate that half of the selected units employ the “list” pattern, considered to incorporate the lowest level of connectivity in terms of textual structure, while half of the selected textbooks tended to utilize the same rhetorical pattern throughout their units. Moreover, the analysis of rhetorical patterns highlights the importance of textual structure and connectivity for research into the compilation of textbooks.

The purpose of this study was to examine effects of orthography on word recognition process of onomatopeic words. Effect of orthography was examined by comparison between Hiragana and Katakana. Participants were requested to read 11 onomatopeic words that were presented by different orthography and to evaluate familiarity for orthography of onomatopoeic word. In reading task, We measured naming latency under two conditions (Immediate and Delayed), and compared it between Hiragana and Katakana. The results indicated, reading latency of Katakana was longer than it of Hiragana. On the other hand, familiarity for orthography showed no deviation between Hiragana and Katakana. That is, difference of orthography in onomatopeic words is not necessarily based on bias of familiarity. Effects of orthography in onomatopeic words may differ from the effects in the noun that has been previously reported. So, The effect of visual properties of orthography needs to be further examined.