EN
Literary culture experts agree that, to teach effectively, teachers must first be readers and/or writers themselves. This article is making the result of the empirical research on the literary culture of students of the Academy of Special Education in Warsaw. The overall goal of those experiments is to show the place of literature in the hierarchy of cultural values and its role in the process of self-education of students. The authoress shows a qualitative and quantitative approach toward the following, constitutive elements of the literary culture of an individual: knowledge and literary competency, literature appreciation, reading habits, interests and reader's needs, attitudes toward literature and literary occurrences and functions of literature in shaping the personality of pedagogy students.