Our aim was to make our students read more and understand the benefits they gain by reading. Reading gives an opportunity to expand one´s horizons and provides escape, but can also open doors. It also provides information, both academic and for keeping up with the interests. Our main objective was to motivate our students in their literature and language studies and make them interested in the bigger picture of literature all over Europe. We wanted them to be aware of the diversity of literature that we have in Europe, both fiction and non-fiction. With our project we wanted to raise literature and literacy awareness both among our students and also among the teachers and the principals. We also wanted to give our teachers opportunities to cooperate with their European colleagues and empower them to develop their teaching skills and course contents and materials. On the other hand we wanted to give both our teachers, students and librarians a chance to practice their foreign language skills, intercultural communication and project management skills. The concrete objective of our project was to have a student-designed literature course.
The majority of our students don´t read for pleasure. We had found out that this is a common problem in all the European countries. At the same time as young people read less they seem to be less able and interested in studying, have difficulties in concentrating and smaller vocabularies but also experience more stress. We believed that given the opportunity to study literature in different ways in different environments and together with their European peers they would find the positive effects reading has and by making the activities visible in our schools these effects could be found by larger groups of students in each partner school.