The purpose of this master’s thesis is to give knowledge about the reading habits and library usage of Swedish for Immigrants students. The research questions focus on the students’ reading habits, their motives and obstacles when it comes to reading and the role of the public library regarding the students’ reading. Ten qualitative interviews were carried out with Swedish for Immigrants students at a school in a small town. The results were first thematically analysed and then analysed using Furhammar’s (1997) theory of different categories of benefits from reading. 

As expected from such a heterogeneous group of people, the results showed a wide variety of reading habits with the respondents. In common for all of them was, however, their focus on learning Swedish. The study showed that some of the respondents did some extensive reading apart from their language learning, a couple of them mainly in their mother tongue. Some of the respondents seemed to have dropped the habit of reading for pleasure since their arrival to Sweden. Several of the respondents expressed a lack of availability when it came to literature in their mother tongue. The respondents had low expectations on the library to provide them with the literature they needed and none of them seemed to be aware of the possibility for distance loans through the public library. The thesis concludes that the libraries need to reach out with information about the library services and that an expanded cooperation with the Swedish for Immigrants education could be of importance to that end.