| 1. |
- Annerberg, Anna, 1972-
(author)
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Gymnasielärares skrivpraktiker : skrivande som professionell handling i en digitaliserad skola
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to contribute to deeper knowledge about the writing practices of teachers in upper secondary school. Schools are under constant pressure to respond to the needs and expectations of an ever-changing society and political intentions. A major factor in this change which is taking place in schools is digitalization. Another factor is the adoption of new governing principles for schools involving management by goals and results, which brings increased demands for written documentation of teachers' work.In order to describe and problematize this development the thesis is based on a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and New Literacy (Clark and Ivanič, 1997). The theoretical framework rests upon an understanding of writing as social action and the idea that texts both affect and are affected by the social environment. The empirical study focuses on twelve teachers and their writing practices, analyzed during week-long field visits over three years. The teachers' talk about their writing is used together with analyses of texts and images to investigate parts of teachers' writing which, according to the teachers, are considered complex and problematic.The findings indicate significant differences between the writing practices of the individual teachers, where each teacher has his or her own system of texts fulfilling different purposes. Despite these differences it is still possible to identify recurrent themes in the discursive conditions for teachers' writing: efficiency, reuse, authority, audit, relationships to addressees, and room to maneuver. The study illustrates possible dilemmas for teachers' writing at the intersection of teachers' professional responsibility and demands for accountability.
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| 2. |
- Berends, Gerrit, 1965-
(author)
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Skrivsamarbete i högre utbildning : Tre studenters skribentprofiler i kollaborativa skrivargrupper
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The overarching aim of this thesis is to probe more deeply into how collaborative writing can help to socialise students in a writing practice. More specifically, the thesis deals with lab report writing and the relationship of three students with different backgrounds to the educational practices of a university department. The three students differ in language background, previous higher education and vocational experience. The material comprises recordings of student discussions while writing lab reports in a group. The students and their lab report writing in different group constellations has been followed longitudinally for between two to four semesters. In addition the development of the lab reports over time has been studied, as well as teachers’ comments on them. Student acquisition of the genre is linked to internal textual criteria (textual aspects) and to extratextual criteria in the educational context.In view of the study’s focus on group collaboration a socio-cultural perspective has been adopted as a frame. A model developed by Storch (2002) based on Vygotsky’s role relationships between expert and novice is used to shed light on how the students resolve problems related to the writing task through group discussions.The results show that the students’ backgrounds play a role in the creation of their profiles in the collaborative writing groups. The student with a second-language background often seeks support, not least where linguistic correctness is concerned, and cites what teachers say as arguments. The student with prior experience of academic writing appears to be a seasoned writer, for instance by daring to deviate from instructions and teachers’ directives. The third student uses his professional experience of writing lab reports in discussions to gain acceptance for his ideas.
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| 3. |
- Lindgren Eneflo, Elisabeth, 1956-
(author)
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Dokumentationens dilemman : förskollärare samtalar om pedagogisk dokumentation
- 2014
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Pedagogical documentation is a certain procedure for documenting that, in recent years, has been embraced in several Swedish preschools. Teachers document children’s actions and conversations usually by photos or video recordings. This documentation is to be used for a pedagogical purpose. However, studies and governmental inspections have shown that pedagogical documentation gives rise to many questions among preschool teachers. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into what is being expressed when preschool teachers discuss pedagogical documentation, focusing on themes of content and on the participants’ expressions of their points of view. The data is comprised of transcriptions from audio recordings of discussions conducted in a research circle. The participants are eight preschool teachers that met over the course of one year. Each meeting focused on the documentation provided by a different participant. In that way the contents of the discussions were framed by the teachers own questions and narratives. Theoretically, the study departs from Social Constructionism and Discursive Psychology. The preschool teachers’ utterances have been analyzed using concepts of interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas. The results show the main themes to be: Knowledge content in a preschool setting, children’s learning, the teacher’s role and implementation of pedagogical documentation. The participants’ joint position is that the knowledge content at the preschool level is defined by the curriculum for the preschool. Concerning children’s learning and the teacher’s role, two main standpoints are disclosed. Ideologically those standpoints derive from two opposing theories of education. Based on how the standpoints have been expressed I have called them ”predetermined learning” versus ”non-predetermined learning”. One main distinction between the standpoints is that predetermined learning emphasizes the results of learning, while non-predetermined learning emphasizes the processes of learning. The participants’ utterances show that teachers tend to subscribe to the idea that there is only one acceptable way of working with pedagogical documentation. This sometimes creates performance anxiety and feelings of not succeeding and has led to arguments advocating an alternate approach; pedagogical documentation can be done in many ways. The ideological dilemmas within the discourse can be perceived as resources by which the participants argue about knowledge, learning, teaching and about the implementation of pedagogical documentation.
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| 4. |
- Lundmark, Aili, 1968-
(author)
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Föränderligt och beständigt : En studie av Elsa Beskows berättarspråk
- 2015
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is a study of the narrative language of Elsa Beskow, Sweden's most famous children's writer of the early twentieth century. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of why Beskow's stories are still among the most popular children's books in Sweden, more than a hundred years after her literary debut.My investigation is a quantitative study of word-class distribution, various syntactic features, and readability in four picture-books and four other stories.To begin with, Beskow's language is compared to that of other texts written for young readers, including children's fiction, a contemporary reading-book, and popular comic strips. The results indicate that Beskow has something in common with all of these materials, especially with children's fiction. However, she also has her own style, which is different from the children's fiction I compare with. For example, her sentences are comparatively long and often begin with a conjunction. Moreover, Beskow uses many address phrases and interjectional phrases, and the initial clause-constituent is often some other clause element than the subject.Additionally, Beskow's narrative language is compared to conversational language and to formal prose. The results show that Beskow moves along the whole scale, from conversation to formal writing, depending on what aspect of her language use is considered. In some cases, her style even falls outside of the scale. For example, placing the subject in initial position is less common in Beskow's writing than in both conversation and formal writing.Finally, the variation between Beskow's texts is examined. The analysis shows, among other things, that the oral influences on Beskow's style increased during the five decades she wrote stories.
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| 5. |
- Olsson, Annie, 1973-
(author)
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Läroboken i historieundervisningen : en fallstudie med fokus på elever, lärare och läroboksförfattare
- 2014
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate why history textbooks are used the way they are and to identify possible reasons for the contradictions and dilemmas regarding the role of the textbook in history education. This thesis describes a case study of the history teaching at an upper secondary school class and investigates the attitudes of the pupils, teachers and textbook authors towards history, the teaching of history, textbooks and the use of textbooks. The study also investigates the textbook used in the history class and the attitudes that the authors expose in the textbook. The analyses are based on interviews with the pupils and teacher, the pupils’ responses in a questionnaire, lesson observations, parts of the textbook, and some other teaching materials used in the lessons. In addition to constituting research on attitudes, this study is also linked to cognitive dissonance theory since it highlights dissonance among the attitudes of the teachers, pupils and textbook authors.The study shows that one main dilemma is the fact that the textbook is frequently being used in the classroom, but many pupils find it dull and uninteresting. Other dilemmas are basically explanations for this and are discussed as such. The study also shows that the pupils prefer history lessons that follow certain strategies and that these strategies are only reflected in the textbook to a limited extent. However, these strategies are used to a large extent in the teaching and when other teaching materials are used instead of the textbook. Sometimes the language used in the textbook seems to prevent the pupils from being able to take in the content but they are not given any help to cope with this difficulty. However, the pupils are exposed to other teaching resources, such as films and lectures, which helps them to understand the subject matter and they appreciate such resources more than the textbook. Moreover, the use of this type of learning resources is combined with methodology that is popular among the pupils and they get help from each other and from the teacher when interpreting and working with these resources. The textbook is used primarily individually and some of the pupils find it difficult to understand. In addition, the textbook is used with teaching methodology that the pupils find dull. This could explain why films and lectures are the main focus of the history lessons while the textbook is used primarily as a supplementary factual resource. This may also be a reason why the pupils have a negative attitude towards the textbook.
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| 6. |
- Sahlée, Anna, 1977-
(author)
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Språket och skolämnet svenska som andraspråk : Om elevers språk och skolans språksyn
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Since the school subject Swedish as a second language was established in the Swedish school system in the mid-1990s, the organization of the subject has varied widely across schools, and the outcomes have been poor. This thesis investigates these problems linguistically. The main objective is to explore the school subject Swedish as a second language in relation to the language of students taking the subject. Another aim of this thesis is to illuminate the complex relation between the Swedish language and the use and conception of Swedish as a second language. A critique of the concept of ‘language’ and of language attitudes in the school context is a recurring theme in the thesis.The thesis contains four papers addressing different aspects of the school subject Swedish as a second language. Paper I examines texts and oral presentations from a group of students born in Sweden, analyzing their language from a normative, mainly grammatical, perspective. Paper II develops a model for analyzing text as activity. In Paper III, the model from paper II is applied to analyze students’ narrative texts written as responses to an assignment, focusing on texts that received failing grades. Papers I and III include comparisons with Swedish as a language and as a school subject. Paper IV, finally, analyzes views of language in policy documents.One critical result of the thesis is the identification of a need for a raised awareness about language in schools and society. In the current situation it is hard to establish a discrete boundary dividing the language of students in the subject Swedish as a second language from the language of students in the subject Swedish, but differences can be observed, which in some sense resonates well with the definition of the subject given by the policy documents. Swedish as a second language in schools can be vaguely defined as Swedish with non-Swedish or foreign markers. The vague definition of the subject and the many linguistic conditions built into the subject entail that Swedish as a second language does not seem well-suited for anyone. Employing a combination of a traditional and an alternative view of language, as proposed in this thesis, may be a fruitful way to accommodate all students.
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| 7. |
- Aldrin, Emilia, 1982-
(author)
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Namnval som social handling : Val av förnamn och samtal om förnamn bland föräldrar i Göteborg 2007–2009
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this doctoral thesis is to examine how parents in Sweden at the beginning of the twenty-first century use the process of naming as a resource to contribute to the creation of various identities for both themselves and their child. It is based on a two-component study — a postal survey and qualitative group interviews, both conducted in the city of Göteborg, Sweden — and includes parents with children born during 2007 and 2008. By combining different sources (names, surveys and interviews) and different methods (quantitative and qualitative), this study attempts to elucidate how first names and choices of first names can be given various social meanings. In contrast to previous socio-onomastic studies, this study considers not only whether naming contains any social variation, but also how and why such variation arises. The theoretical framework is a combination of onomastic, sociolinguistic, identity-theoretical and interactional theories. The results demonstrate that parents’ choice of first names for their children is an important social act. Through name choices and discussions of these choices, parents create what is known as social positioning, which in turn contributes to the creation of certain identities both for themselves and their child. A number of resources are identified which are used by parents to create different social positionings. This study also demonstrates how both macro-societal structures and interactional aspects influence this social positioning. Finally, this study argues that the observed social variation is best explained by the parents’ desire to identify with and contribute to the creation of different models for society, in which varying social values and attributes are important.
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| 8. |
- Lim Falk, Maria, 1974-
(author)
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Svenska i engelskspråkig skolmiljö : Ämnesrelaterat språkbruk i två gymnasieklasser
- 2008
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to determine how English-language teaching in Sweden influences the subject-based communicative competence and language development in Swedish of upper secondary students. The focus is thus on the students’ mother tongue, i.e. the language which gets limited in the teaching practice within so-called content- and language-integrated learning (CLIL).Data was primarily collected by participatory observation in two science program classes, one taught in English and one in Swedish, during their three years in upper secondary school. Additional data was collected through interviews, questionnaires, audio taping of classroom interaction and writing tasks. This created conditions for a comprehensive and nuanced description and interpretation of the linguistic behaviour of teachers and students in the CLIL practice, as well as of the experiences and perceptions they report.Studies were carried out on classroom practice, student texts, and teacher and student experiences of CLIL instruction. These were linked to activity analysis, systemic-functional linguistics and ethnography of communication, i.e. research areas that emphasise the interplay between language, communication and social situation.The general conclusions are: (1) CLIL students use less relevant subject-based language in speech and writing than do control students. This holds for all subjects except Swedish, where both CLIL and control students share linguistic conditions; (2) Swedish is a prerequisite for the students’ own active, subject-based participation in classroom interaction. There is almost no interaction when the language of instruction is English; (3) English is an obstacle, and is also considered as such. The students avoid using English, and the teachers consistently use code-switching strategies in response to the policy that “language should not be an obstacle”.The results suggest that the CLIL environment is less conducive to learning, given current learning theories that focus on active participation. In the already teacher-dominated classroom, the linguistic and interactional demands that come with CLIL teaching seem to add to the challenge of assimilating advanced subject instruction.
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| 9. |
- Ädel, Annelie, et al.
(author)
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In case of emergency : A responsibility perspective on evacuation practices
- 2020
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Risk communication research spans many domains, including the environment, healthcare, science and technology, law enforcement, banking, workplace health and safety (e.g. Chrichton et al. 2016). The EXIT project deals with issues of security and responsibility in relation to communication about evacuation, e.g. in fire hazards or terror attacks. Our study focuses both on what evacuation information to the general public looks like and on policies and attitudes behind specific evacuation information guiding the general public. We see evacuation information as a possible resource for the distribution of responsibility. The aim is to investigate how groups and individuals construe their sense of responsibility in relation to evacuation: (a) How do people discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations?; (b) To what extent does their interpretation of what to do correlate with the intentions of the policy makers producing and sanctioning the evacuation information (on signs, websites)?; (c) What is the purpose of the meaning production in this field of discourse: is the primary function to make evacuation as efficient as possible in a risk situation; is it to educate the public in how to behave in situations of risk; or is the giving of evacuation information a mere ritual? As a first step of data collection, we have analyzed evacuation signs and conducted focus group discussions at a higher education institution in order to evaluate participants’ understanding of evacuation practices and individual responsibility within the institution. ReferencesCrichton, Jonathan, Candlin, Christopher N. & Firkins, Arthur S. (Eds). (2016). Communicating Risk. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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| 10. |
- Ädel, Annelie, et al.
(author)
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Risks and responsibilities in the workplace: : Employees discussing evacuation situations
- 2022
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In: Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. - : Equinox Publishing. - 2040-3658 .- 2040-3666. ; 16:3, s. 265-288
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study analyses experiences with and in relation to issues of risk, responsibility and evacuation in workplace settings as discussed in four focus groups in Sweden and Swedish-language Finland. The discussions, and in particular the participants’ positionings in their ‘small stories’, are analysed from two perspectives: that of narratives, and that of interpretive repertoires. The main question under investigation is how employees at different workplaces discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations. The findings show that these issues are handled very differently in different workplaces, but at all in accordance with the participants’ implicit responsibility positionings and what we see as the interpretive repertoires (organisational, instinctual, skills-based and informational) they draw on. Whereas previous studies have considered workplaces with high-stakes settings, the present study is set in workplaces where risk is not thematised on a regular basis, making the results applicable not only to workplace scenarios, but to society at large.
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