L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature
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Function and use of literary texts in Nordic schools
Get PDFIn this comparative study, naturally occurring literature instruction in Nordic lower secondary school is investigated in order to find out how lessons are organized, to what extent different genres are read and worked upon, and for what subject-specific functions and purposes literary texts are used. Implications for text selection by teachers are discussed. The study relies on four consecutive video-recorded language arts lessons from 102 classrooms in Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The function and use of literary texts were investigated by means of video-analysis and statistical comparisons. The analysis clearly indicates that literature plays an important part in Nordic language arts education. In all four countries, narrative fiction texts were favored above other genres. When the aim was to give students joint reading experiences, short stories and excerpts from novels were normally used. Reading literature for the sake of developing comprehension appears to be a dominant function of using literary texts in Nordic lower secondary arts classrooms. The present study also suggests that it is important for Nordic teachers to provide their students with positive reading experiences
Digging into the extremes: A case study of figured worlds of early literacy instruction among homeroom teachers in more or less successful co-taught classrooms
No full textCo-taught classrooms offer increased opportunities for differentiated, engaging and effective instruction. However, the inclusion of another professional in the classroom may collide with teachers’ taken-for-granted perspectives on what a teacher, a student, literacy activities or a classroom in early literacy instruction are or should be. Aiming to shed light on the relationship between such perspectives and students’ learning outcomes in co-taught classrooms, the present study takes a step back to investigate figured worlds (Gee, 2011) of the social practice of early literacy instruction, as held by homeroom teachers. In-depth individual interviews with six homeroom teachers in classes with very strong versus very poor reading development in first and second grade are investigated using a discourse-analytical approach. The extremes are found to differ in their understandings of students, teachers, classrooms, activities, organizational structures, instructional differentiation, and student engagement. Juxtaposing understandings of all of these elements shows that there are fundamental differences between those extremes in terms of their figured worlds of early literacy instruction as a complex social practice. This finding suggests that an awareness of homeroom teachers’ figured worlds is required when discussing the potential for enhancing student learning through co-teaching
Emergent literary literacy
Get PDFResearch on early school writing has focused primarily on formal aspects of writing, such as spelling, punctuation and various aspects of text structure. Less attention has been given to what distinguishes the content of these early texts and how particular disciplinary content is developed and identified. This study endeavours to examine the subject specific content in early school writing of literary texts with the following research questions. (1) What content is construed in narrative texts written by students in early school years (grades 2-3)? (2) What linguistic resources are used to construe this content? This study offers a model for addressing content aspects of early school writing, giving empirical example of analysis of early narrative writing in primary school. The data consists of two groups of narrative texts written by the same children in school years 2 and 3, in relation to two comparable tasks. Our analytical framework is inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics and in particular the analytical tool set provided by cohesion and transitivity analyses. We conclude that narrative writing in primary school can mean both to explore a diverse textual world and a more uniform one. We further claim that signs of emerging literary literacy may be detected throughout the analysed data sets by using the text analytic method suggested
The challenge of plurality: A comment on the occasion of the journal L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature being 20
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Young writers ‘learning to mean’: From classroom discourse to personal intentions
Get PDFDrawing on writing conversations with L1 writers, writing in UK primary and secondary English language classrooms, this paper considers evidence for how ‘learning to mean’ develops: a term coined by Halliday emphasising language awareness as a semiotic resource. The research was undertaken in classrooms adopting a pedagogy previously shown to be effective (Myhill et al 2012) that explicitly highlights the effect of linguistic choices, thus is faithful to the Hallidayan intention to foreground meaning. The examples of young writers ‘learning to mean’ reported here are often unconscious, fleeting and partial: indicating the complexity for young writers in articulating this understanding and for teachers in supporting it. Nevertheless there is evidence that young writers are using language choices purposefully to create meaning. The study was longitudinal with data collected over a three year period, enabling the exploration of changing patterns of student talk about their own writing. Key themes that emerged from the qualitative data analysis are that 1) rhetorical choices are being articulated; often in relation to word choice, 2) there was a growing awareness of the reader, 3) there is an emerging consciousness that their own choices as a writer can create a literary ‘effect’ and 4) an increasingly visible ability to articulate this effect. The paper will argue that the discourses of the classroom can shape, limit and enable the move from dependence to independence, as young writers learn how to use linguistic resources to express personal writing intentions. The article aims to con-tribute to a theoretical understanding of how an awareness of how language shapes meaning develops and a pedagogic understanding of how best to support this development
Cool kids\u27 carnival: Double-voiced discourse in student conversations about literature
Get PDFIn this article we will explore group conversations at lower-secondary school about literary texts perceived as subject specific problems. We will focus on cases interpreted as borderline cases concerning student engagement, i.e., conversations where it is not unambiguously clear whether the students are on-task or off-task. These cases represent pedagogical, interpretative and methodological challenges in that it is not obvious (to either teachers or researchers) how to judge what is going on in the conversations. We will give short descriptive analyses of four conversations before more closely analysing the one that we find the most challenging. Alongside laughter, a prominent feature of all four conversations is a register of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “double-voiced discourse”. Our research question is, “How can we grasp and understand nuances of a double-voiced discourse in student conversations about literature?” Our main framework will be Bakhtin’s approach to literary discourse (Bakhtin, 1981; 1984a; 1986), conceived of as dialogic discourse analysis (cf. Skaftun, 2019). We suggest that this approach can make both teachers and educational researchers more sensitive to productive aspects of playfulness in the classroom
Planning for progression? Norwegian L1 teachers’ conception of literature teaching and literary competence throughout lower secondary education
Get PDFThis article reflects on the literature teaching of lower secondary L1 teachers in Norway. We examine how teachers plan for and assess their students’ literary development, and ask what they consider to be the main purpose of literature teaching, what they understand as literary development, and to what extent they experience and understand literature instruction planning as a collaborative and collegial task. Methodologically, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with L1 teachers (N=9) at one lower secondary school in a Norwegian city. Theoretically, the study builds on L1 paradigm syntheses, models of literary competence, while also lending itself to sociological studies of professions. The findings suggest that Norwegian L1 teachers consider fostering the joy of reading to be the most important aim of literature teaching. Their teaching is legitimized from a reader-oriented position, mainly supported by everyday theory and common-sense discourse rather than scholarship or theories of literary criticism, didactics, or pedagogy. Furthermore, the teachers demonstrate dissenting views on how to plan for and structure students’ development of literary competence throughout the three-year course but tend to agree that the development should progress from experience-based literature teaching to more analytical and interpretative approaches. As a general trend, teachers experience difficulties assessing students’ progression in literary competence, predominantly resorting to assessing students’ knowledge and use of analytical concepts. Finally, the findings imply that variations in the teachers’ understanding of literature teaching’s purpose and in their related planning and assessment should be seen in the context of the school’s professional community, especially regarding what opportunities it facilitates for discipline-specific peer networks
Students\u27 work with literary concepts in digitally rich L1 classrooms
No full textThis article explores students’ learning trajectories in digitalized classrooms as they work with literary concepts in first language (L1) education. Using a multimodal conversation analysis approach, we investigate the emerging activities and epistemic stances that students take when attempting to explain and apply the concepts. Departing from socio-cultural understandings of learning as constituted in interaction, we analyze how students display their understandings with a specific interest in the role of digital resources in the evolving learning trajectories. This research data consists of video-recorded interactions from Swedish and Finnish upper-secondary school classrooms, including the students’ work on their computers and/or smartphones. We demonstrate how digital resources support students in finding suitable explanations for concepts that from a pragmatic view help them solve given tasks. However, it seems that digital resources do not help students develop their everyday understanding of concepts into an academic understanding, which would enable them to apply these concepts in literary analysis
The running text is dead: Inviting the reader to learn from a bullet-pointed peritext-patchwork textbook
Get PDFThis study investigates the relationship between the running text and the many peritexts commonly found in newer textbooks, along with the associated consequences for textbased learning. The paper is a theoretically driven case study that looks at the textual composition patterns in a language arts textbook for lower secondary schools in Norway. In particular, I investigate how these textual composition patterns facilitate learning from text—a main tool in the text analysis is comparing the signaled intentions in the text with the implied reader\u27s fulfilment. The main finding of the study is that by enriching a textbook with many peritexts that contain essential content, one risks inviting the implied reader to employ a memorization strategy, even though the intention is to invite the implied reader to use deep-comprehension cognitive strategies. This is connected with the lack of running text. Without enough running text to synthesize the content, the running text appears dead, and rather than learning from the text, students are more likely to receive a memorization invitation from the text
Dialogic space in Norwegian early-years literacy education
Get PDFThis study explores and analyses conditions for student participation in Norwegian Year Two classrooms. It is inspired by the concept of dialogic space (Wegerif, 2013) and by Segal and Lefstein\u27s (2016) model for the realization of student voice. Six classrooms were observed for one week. This yielded field notes and summaries from 105 lessons across all subjects and video data from all 47 Norwegian (L1) lessons. Our analyses show that there is practically no pair or group work and that station work is predominantly silent, leaving whole-class teaching as the most prominent space for dialogue. Our analyses aim to identify events in whole-class teaching with dialogic potential, i.e., where the interaction displays features that might indicate a shift from recitation to conversation (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). In these conversational events, we find increased teacher dominance when dealing with disciplinary content. When students are given the floor, the focus tends to be on non-disciplinary content. Students\u27 talk about texts and disciplinary ideas is suggested as a productive ground for creating dialogic space in early-years literacy education