ARLE 2019
Abstracts for 'Pre-conference for PhDs participating in the ARLE 2019 conference. Register for free'

Louise Almqvist	The Toe-Trick: Using Queer Theory in Literature Education
Andrew D Carr	Knowledge in England’s Key Stage 3-4 National Curriculum 2014 and its impact on the teaching of English.
Eva Dam Christensen	Exploratory and Critical Dialogues as Learning and Reflection Tools
Hans Das Barend P. van Heusden Theo Witte Gillis J. Dorleijn	Students’ attitude towards poetry, the way(s) in which they read poetry and stages of poetry reading
Elias Heikkonen	The relationship between textual and contextual knowledge in assessing and developing literary literacy
Julie Marie Isager	Students’ preparatory processes and conceptions of oral exams in upper-secondary Danish high schools
Sofia Jusslin	The entanglements of writing and dance: Creative dance integration in primary school students’ creative writing
Evie Poyiadji	Seeking and problematizing the conceptualizations of “new” in literacy pedagogy: A case study of one primary teacher’ (digital) literacy practices in Greek – Cypriot educational settings
Marianna Szumal	Polish-Jewish heritage in literature education in Polish primary schools
Stina Thunberg	The reading avatar: Literacy and gamification
Jimmy H.M. van Rijt	Fostering linguistic (meta)concept use in secondary education. Evaluating design principles
Astrid Wijnands	Developing an instrument for measuring reflective thinking about grammar

Louise Almqvist (Sweden)
THE TOE-TRICK: USING QUEER THEORY IN LITERATURE EDUCATION

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00

Room T11

Chair: Coutinho, Antónia

Discussants: Coutinho (Portugal); Elf (Denmark)

Keywords: Queer, Reading, Discourse, Literature, Education
Researcher: Louise Almqvist, PhD Student, Umeå University

Abstract:
In this presentation I will give a brief summary of my ongoing studies, and an example of my preliminary results. The aim of my study is to explore how queer theory could be used in literature education, specifically within the subject of Swedish at upper secondary level. The purpose of this two-fold. First of all, both PISA-results and previous research would suggest that swedes are quite poor readers of fiction, and there are ongoing calls in media to ban or censor “difficult” or “problematic” texts. Second, we have a growing right-wing movement and school steering documents that urges teachers to embody a democratic value-system in all subjects. My hypothesis is that teaching literature from a queer analytical perspective can make literature more useful, by helping teachers fulfill their steering-needs and by letting students explore relevant issues, thus allowing more reading in school, but also creating better readers, prepared to meet different kinds of texts, and to reflect and discuss upon them.
An important part of my project will be combining discourse- and queer theory, like Foucault and Butler, with affective reception-theory like Felski, and literature pedagogy along the line of Rosenblatt. This will form the theoretical groundwork for a queer didactic literature education. I will then apply this by making queer/didactic readings of thematic groups of texts, consisting of a mix of books for children, teenagers and adults, popular as well as high literature, old and new. I will also look at the reception of the works, as a reference-point for making alternative readings. I will hereby provide teachers with multiple readings, perspectives and angles on the texts – not as a correct reading, but rather to help counter students reactions and arguments when discussing the texts, to make them think further/differently. I will end by giving a small example.

References:
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I-III (1976–1984)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2008)
Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1938


Andrew D Carr (United Kingdom (The))
KNOWLEDGE IN ENGLAND’S KEY STAGE 3-4 NATIONAL CURRICULUM 2014 AND ITS IMPACT ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH.

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00

Room T10

Chair: Pieper, Irene

Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Gonçalves (Portugal)

Has the focus on official knowledge in England’s Key Stage 3-4 National Curriculum (2014) led to a change in the way that teachers teach English?

The teaching of language and literature in England is constrained by national policy, as prescribed by the political construction of the Key Stage 3-4 National Curriculum for English at the Department for Education (Isaacs, 2014). This has been evident in England since the election of the Conservative party in 2010, when New Labour’s policy of community responsibility was replaced by the neo-conservative perspective (as defined by Bernstein, 1996) of the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove,

Gove’s claim, at that time, was that conceptual knowledge was limited in a vague national curriculum of little value. Yet critics, such as Isaacs (2014), have argued that what followed – the current National Curriculum of 2014 – was a curriculum dense in facts.

My doctoral thesis is therefore bounded around the way in which secondary school English teachers have used agency, as defined by Priestley, Biesta and Robinson (2015), to interpret and enact this curriculum, in order to consider the way in which they want their pupils to engage with language and literature.

Through an ethnographic methodology and multiple-case study method (Stake, 1995), I have begun to explore English teachers’ perceptions of the knowledge they encapsulate in their teaching, its alignment with the official knowledge (Bernstein, 1996) of the National Curriculum and the pedagogy that they use to present it in the classroom. Formal and informal interviews, lesson observations and artefact/document analysis have formed much of the data collection process, exploring current practice and comparing this to perceptions of practice under the previous national curriculum.

The collection of data is currently on-going and this presentation aims to explore the data collected to date and what this might be suggesting about the current climate of England’s secondary school English classrooms.

References:
Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Maryland, USA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Isaacs, T. (2014) ‘Curriculum and assessment reform gone wrong: the perfect storm of GCSE English’, The Curriculum Journal, 25(1), pp. 130–147.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) ‘Teacher agency: what is it and why does it matter’, in Kneyber, R. and Evers, J. (eds) Flip the System: Changing Education from the Bottom Up. London, UK: Routledge.

Stake, R. E. (1995) The Art of Case Study Research. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Key words:
curriculum, official knowledge, pedagogy, agency, case study


Eva Dam Christensen (Denmark)
EXPLORATORY AND CRITICAL DIALOGUES AS LEARNING AND REFLECTION TOOLS

Pre-conference ARLE 2019	Tuesday, 14:30-16:00	Room T10	Chair: Pieper, Irene	Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Gonçalves (Portugal)
Short presentations (poster) and extended discussion ARLE 2019	Wednesday, 14:30-15:30	Room T14	Chair: Fontich, Xavier

Introduction.
This intervention study investigates and qualifies students` use of exploratory and critical
dialogues when reading multimodal texts in lower secondary school. I investigate how
students engage in group dialogues to develop skills for critical communication and
validating texts on websites through interthinking
The study has its main theoretical foundation in a sociocultural understanding (Vygotsky, 1986, Bakhtin, 1986, Maine, 2015). Learning and understanding does not happen individually but is developed through dialogues in social contexts.
Research Questions:
How do students working in groups use dialogue to explore the content and credibility of websites?
How can we qualify the same dialogue by facilitating an exploratory and critical validation of it by students?
Methods & Data Sources.
This PhD project is an intervention study with four lower secondary classes participating. To describe the field before and after the intervention, I have completed an initial dialogue test of students` group work based on their dialogue while reading websites and a dialogue test after the intervention. Data are conducted through video and audio records of students group dialogues and focus group interviews.
My hypothesis is that when students reflect and have a meta-dialog over their own dialogue, they can strengthen their ability to criticize and make source criticism of websites
Analysis
First part of the transcriptions and the interviews of the focus groups indicates that when the teacher set up dialogic group assignments the student isn`t aware of how to be critical
Students try to analyze the elements on the website by reading the multimodal information and then assessing the credibility of the content without exploring how the website's multimodal texts interact and what it can do for credibility
Significance
It seems that the students' observation of their own group dialogues helps to qualify their study of the same group dialogues and allows for meta-reflection.
The aim I work on is that students acquire dialogue and critical communication skills as awareness that knowledge is not secure and in fact and that students themselves must learn to deal with this uncertainty by making assessments of the Internet texts

Key words: exploratory and critical dialogue, interthinking, digital multimodal texts, group dialogue

References.
· Littleton, Karen & Mercer, Neil (2013): Interthinking, Putting Talk to work, Routhledge
· Maine, Fiona (2015): Dialogic Readers. Children talking and thinking together about visual texts, Routhledge
· Mercer, Neil and Hodgkinson, Steve (2010): Exploring Talk in School, Sage Publications
· Wegerif, R. (2016). Applying dialogic theory to illuminate the relationship between literacy education and teaching thinking in the context of the Internet Age. Contribution to a special issue on International Perspectives on Dialogic Theory and Practice, edited by Sue Brindley, Mary Juzwik, and Alison Whitehurst. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, p. 1-21.





Hans Das & Barend P. van Heusden & Theo Witte & Gillis J. Dorleijn (Netherlands (the))
STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS POETRY, THE WAY(S) IN WHICH THEY READ POETRY AND STAGES OF POETRY READING

Pre-conference ARLE 2019	Tuesday, 16:30-18:00	Room T10	Chair: Elf, Nikolaj	Discussants: Elf (Denmark); Feytor Pinto (Portugal)
Paper session ARLE 2019	Thursday, 15:45-17:15	Room T16	Chair: Ohlsson, Elisabeth

Although most L1-teachers in the Netherlands are convinced of the importance of poetry, little attention is paid to poetry in the literary classroom. A Dutch survey among 225 L1-teachers in secondary education (Vekobo project, s.d.) showed that a large majority are dissatisfied about the curriculum structure and the way they deal with differences between students.
This is hardly surprising, since poetry reading in secondary education still remains an underdeveloped field of research (Dymoke, Lambirth, & Wilson, 2013). In order to enhance poetry teaching, more research is needed into the students’ attitude towards, and the way(s) in which they read poetry.

This study addresses two research questions: what are the characteristics of students’ attitude toward poetry and how do these affect their reading strategies? And second: can we discern levels or stages of poetry reading? And if so: how many, and on the basis of which criteria?
The research connects to two studies which focused on reading prose. Janssen et al (2006) researched different reading activities applied by strong and weak readers of short stories and Witte et al (2012) described developmental levels for reading and understanding novels.

A study into the pedagogical content knowledge (pck) of expert poetry teachers, explored in focus groups, led to a first demarcation of four ability levels for both lower and upper secondary education and to sets of poems that connected to these levels.
In a second study the concepts, preferences and reading processes of students (N=38) were examined by means of interviews and think-aloud sessions. Based on these data, three types of poetry readers were distinguished for both lower and upper secondary students.
On the basis of the research on teachers’ pck and students’ reading practice we developed a survey to be completed by 4400 students from all over the Netherlands. The results (summer 2019) should provide insight into the existence of poetry reader types, as well as (developmental) stages of lyrical abilities – allowing for the design of (a) poetry learning line(s) in secondary education.


References:
Dymoke, S., Lambirth, A., & Wilson, A. (Eds.). (2013). Making poetry matter: International research on poetry pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury.

Janssen, T., Braaksma, M & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2006). Literary reading activities of good and weak students: A think aloud study. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 21(1), 35-52

Vekobo project (s.d.). Legitimacy, status and practical problems of teaching poetry in secondary education in the Netherlands. Groningen: Teacher Education Centre RUG (to be published).

Witte, T., Rijlaarsdam, G., & Schram, D. (2012). An empirically grounded theory of literary development: Teachers' pedagogical content knowledge on literary development in upper secondary education. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 1-30


research area:
poetry in secondary education


key words:
‘poetry education’, ‘literary development’, ‘reader profiles’, ‘focus groups’, ‘interviews and thinking aloud’


Elias Heikkonen (Finland)
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEXTUAL AND CONTEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE IN ASSESSING AND DEVELOPING LITERARY LITERACY

Pre-conference ARLE 2019	Tuesday, 14:30-16:00	Room T10	Chair: Pieper, Irene	Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Gonçalves (Portugal)
Paper session ARLE 2019	Friday, 14:00-15:30	Room T16	Chair: Levine, Sarah

The relationship between textual and contextual knowledge in assessing and developing literary literacy
Literature education faces a perennial challenge in the summative assessment of students’ literary literacy, especially when conducted on a regional, national or even international level. Two central reasons for this are the variety of textual practices in different literary texts and the unlimited variety of contexts texts can be related to. Depending on the task and the form of assessment this variety requires different amounts of textual and contextual knowledge from the student.
Assessment institutions manage this challenge through different approaches to both the tasks and their assessment: for example by defining a canon of literary texts, giving local freedom to the selection of literary texts for the tasks or by de-emphasizing the meaning of contextual knowledge and focusing on assessing textual knowledge.
Different approaches not only entail different conceptions of assessing literary literacy, but also the nature of literary literacy itself. They also have impact on literature education because high-stakes assessment affects teaching through its institutional importance and because of the general requirement for reciprocity between teaching and assessment.
Assessment in general can be examined from the properties of 1) validity 2) reliability 3) impact and 4) resources required (Harlen 2007). These properties also interact with one another: changes in one affect changes in one or more of the others. Examining how these properties are valued in relation to one another can provide insight when comparing different approaches to literary literacy assessment
In this paper I will examine through document analysis how upper secondary educational institutions in Finland and elsewhere approach literary literacy assessment in L1 from three aspects:
a) managing the relationship between textual and contextual knowledge
b) valuing the different properties of assessment
c) defining (explicitly or implicitly) literary literacy itself
My goal is to show that these aspects are interdependent on one another and a change in one can have an important effect on the others. Another goal is to show that because of the assessment’s wider impact on literature education all three aspects should be sufficiently taken into consideration when developing the assessment of literary literacy.

Bibliography:
Alderson, J. Charles (2000): Assessing Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hall, Geoff (2005): Literature in Language Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fiebich, Peggy – Thielking, Sigrid [Hgg.] (2010): Literatur im Abitur – Reifeprüfung mit Kompetenz? Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag.
Harlen, Wynne (2007): Assessment of Learning. SAGE Publications ltd.
Leutner, Detlev, - Fleischer, Jens - Grünkorn, Juliane - Klieme, Eckhard (2017): Competence Assessment in Education : Research, Models and Instruments. Cham, Switzerland : Springer.

Keywords: literature education, literary literacy, assessment of literary literacy, textual knowledge, contextual knowledge



Julie Marie Isager (Denmark)
STUDENTS’ PREPARATORY PROCESSES AND CONCEPTIONS OF ORAL EXAMS IN UPPER-SECONDARY DANISH HIGH SCHOOLS

Pre-conference ARLE 2019	Tuesday, 16:30-18:00	Room T11	Chair: Awramiuk, Elżbieta	Discussants: Awramiuk (); Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the))
Short presentations (poster) and extended discussion ARLE 2019	Wednesday, 14:30-15:30	Room T14	Chair: Fontich, Xavier

Introduction
The presentation is an in-progress part of a ph.d. project - an ethnographically inspired exploratory investigation of students' preparatory processes, their expectations and conceptions of high stakes oral exams in their final year of study in the Danish general upper secondary school advanced level - gymnasium. Theoretical inspiration spring from the tradition of rhetoric.
In May the Danish ministry will decide which two or three disciplines each student is to attend shortly before the exam season in June. Oral exam formats differ depending on the school subject, but usually students present and discuss with examiners for 20 minutes.

Research questions: How do students perceive the oral exam situation and its criteria? How do students act to be prepared and how do they explain these actions? Which materials and interactions inspire the perceived criteria and preparatory processes?

Methods & Data: In my fieldwork I followed four case-students age 18-20 in three classrooms in two schools for five months in the spring semester 2018 preparing for their oral exams. The four students attended a total of 10 disciplines taught by 18 teachers. Materials are fieldnotes, audio-recorded observations of teaching, observation of oral exams, interviews (with 15 students), students’ notebooks, social media-interactions between students ect.

Analysis will focus on two case-students’ trails in preparing for the exam to illustrate details, timing and social contexts for their understandings of the criteria and actions. Theoretical interests (for now) are concepts of rhetorical invention and construction of universal audiences.

Tentative results and significance: At the present analytical stage, it seems that written notes play a particularly important part in students’ preparatory processes. Written notes are organized, consulted, produced, evaluated, and shared. Students analyze the situational features of the oral assessment situation in painstaking detail. The ethnographically inspired study amongst students will (hopefully) be able to illuminate students’ perceptions on a very sensitive topic that would be hard for an insider to gain access to because of the complicated social dynamics in classrooms and assessment regimes.

Key words: Oral exam, case study, rhetoric, invention, students’ perspective

References

Huxham, M., Campbell, F., & Westwood, J. (2012). Oral versus written assessments: A test of student performance and attitudes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(1), 125–136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.515012
Joughin, G. R. (2003). Oral assessment from the learner’s perspective: The experience of oral assessment in post -compulsory education (Ph.D.). Griffith University (Australia), Australia. Hentet fra http://search.proquest.com/docview/305268419/abstract/9FE883360C4A4F09PQ/1
Kvifte, B. H. (2011). Muntlig eksamen sett fra studentperspektiv: en undersøkelse blant lærerstudenter ved Høgskolen i Østfold. Hentet fra https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/147658
Rai, C., & Druschke, C. G. (Red.). (2018). Field rhetoric: ethnography, ecology, and engagement in the places of persuasion. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.


Sofia Jusslin (Finland)
THE ENTANGLEMENTS OF WRITING AND DANCE: CREATIVE DANCE INTEGRATION IN PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ CREATIVE WRITING

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00

Room T11

Chair: Coutinho, Antónia

Discussants: Coutinho (Portugal); Elf (Denmark)

Bodily modes of meaning are emphasized as part of students’ comprehensive literacy education. Still, in comparison to, for example, verbal and visual modes, bodily modes have not received equal attention in educational practices and educational research. In my PhD project, I approach this by integrating creative dance into fifth-graders’ creative writing. Creative writing has many similarities with meaning-making in dance-making and research has suggested that dance can challenge creative writing practices and that combining writing and dancing can enhance development and learning in both forms of expression.

The PhD project is conducted as an educational design research project (McKenney & Reeves, 2012) that aims to (a) develop and investigate teaching pedagogies with creative dance in the teaching of creative writing and (b) further the theoretical knowledge of combining writing with dance in educational settings. Adopting a broad and holistic view on writing and meaning-making using a theoretical lens informed by new materialism (Barad, 2003, 2007) and embodied learning (Anttila, 2013), creative dance is used to further develop, inspire and support phases of prewriting, writing, revision, editing and publishing.

Two research cycles are conducted in 2018-2019 by a design team consisting of researchers, a dance teacher and primary school teachers. Drawing on multiple sources of data, such as video recorded dance lessons, interviews with students, audio recorded planning and evaluation meetings, lesson plans, student texts and field notes, my thesis will include sub studies with focus on theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of creative dance integration in students’ creative writing. In this presentation, I present an overview of the vast empirical data and wish to discuss possible delimitations in the empirical sub studies.

Key words: creative dance; creative writing; dance literacy; educational design research;

References

Anttila, E. (2013). Koko koulu tanssii! Kehollisen oppimisen mahdollisuuksia kouluyhteisössä [The entire school dances! The opportunities of embodied learning in a school community]. Helsinki, Finland: Teatterikorkeakoulu.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. C. (2012). Conducting educational design research. Abingdon: Routledge.


Evie Poyiadji (Cyprus)
SEEKING AND PROBLEMATIZING THE CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF “NEW” IN LITERACY PEDAGOGY: A CASE STUDY OF ONE PRIMARY TEACHER’ (DIGITAL) LITERACY PRACTICES IN GREEK – CYPRIOT EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 16:30-18:00

Room T10

Chair: Elf, Nikolaj

Discussants: Elf (Denmark); Feytor Pinto (Portugal)

This presentation explores the different conceptualizations of ''new'' in (digital) literacy practices of one primary teacher in the Republic of Cyprus, who is make part of the modern generation of “digitally savvy teachers” (Flores & Day, 2006) in order to answer questions on how literacy is (re)conceptualized as ''new'' in performative acts of teachers that combine (im)material forces within and across the school. The different meanings of ''new'' are discussed in connection to the varied interpretations of digital tools, digital media and new technologies, which were employed in teachers' practices of their engagement with the digital over the research of their personal lives and in the classrooms (Burnett et al., 2015; Gruszczynska et al., 2013).
The study is theoretically grounded in New Literacy Studies that understand literacy as social practice and identities/subjectivities (Gee, 2010) in the context of Discourse(s), the embodied performance of normalized meanings of literacy, and the emergence of experience with/in material conditions (e.g., artifacts, texts, spaces) (Burnett et al.;2014; Burnett, 2016; Youdell, 2006). Methodologically, the suggestion is part of my PhD thesis, aiming to identify the digital literacy practices of Primary Education teachers within (language lesson) and outside school (personal space-time), the conditions which may affect their choices, as well their realizations which refer to (a) specific conceptualization(s) of literacy in a personal, local/school and broader institutional context(s). Thematic analysis was used, is multilevel: it was utilized to compare the teacher’ literacy practices with tools, (im)material resources both in two spaces, to conceptualize the ‘’new’’ in literacy pedagogy by examining the teacher’ practices and to (re)frame the teachers as pedagogical and literate subjectivities through their specific practices and realizations.
Finally, it reviews the power of digital literacy in L1 settings as an hybrid practice, being understood that “new” is subjected, mediated and redefined by “old”, given that there were notable complexities and paradoxes across as well as within the cases under study, which are referred to the use of digital media. This multiplicity in paradoxes allows, accordingly, the understanding of literacy as an equalizer or/and reproducer in a society of inequalities both for children and for teachers.

Keywords: technology, new, digitally savvy teachers, digital literacy practices

References
-Burnett, C. (2016). The digital age and its implications for learning and teaching in the primary school. York: Cambridge Primary Review Trust.
-Burnett, C., Merchant, G., Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2014). The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1), 90-103, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2012.739469
-Burnett, C., Daniels, K., Gray, L., Myers, J., & Sharpe, S. (2015). Investigating students – teachers’ presentations of literacy and literacy pedagogy in a complex content. Teacher Development, 19 (3), 275 -293.
-Flores, M. A. & Day, C. (2006). Contexts which shape and reshape new teachers’ identities: a multi-perspective study. Teaching and teacher education, 22(2), 219-232.
-Gee, J.P. (2010). A situated sociocultural approach to literacy and technology. In E.A. Baker (Ed). The new literacies: Multiple perspectives on research and practice (pp. 165-193). New York: Guilford Press.
-Gruszczynska, A., Merchant, G., Pountney, R. (2013). ‘’Digital Futures in Teacher Education: Exploring Open Approaches towards Digital Literacy’’. Journal of e-Learning, 11 (3), 193-206.
-Youdell, D. (2006). Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and Student Subjectivities. Dordrecht, NL: Springer



Marianna Szumal (Poland)
POLISH-JEWISH HERITAGE IN LITERATURE EDUCATION IN POLISH PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 16:30-18:00

Room T10

Chair: Elf, Nikolaj

Discussants: Elf (Denmark); Feytor Pinto (Portugal)

To meet the challenge explaining the issue of centuries-old co-existence of Poles and Jews and a sudden disappearance of Jews in Poland, we should know how teachers transfer knowledge about Polish-Jewish heritage and if this transfer is effective. So far many researchers have emphasized the need and value of teaching about Holocaust (Jakubowicz-Mount, 2005). My research focuses on the ways of teaching Jewish culture and Shoah, when survivors can no longer testify (Shawn, 2015).

I conducted the research in four primary schools (174 students) – I evaluated the knowledge of primary school’s students about the Jews as a national, religious and cultural group. The analysis show that students know basic facts only about Jewish religion (e.g. story of Abraham) and Shoah. The students are not familiar with the history and culture of Jews living in their towns before the II World War.

Consequently I made the project of 4 lessons based on literature that may involve students in getting to know Jewish-Polish heritage. One of successful tools is the literature for children about The Righteous Among The Nations. During the lessons I discussed a book about the most famous Polish Righteous Irena Sendler. It was ‘Wszystkie moje mamy’ [All my moms] by Renata Piątkowska. The project was a great success on few fields. It also seems that reading the texts devoted to the Polish-Jewish past supports the development of intercultural competences, which are extremely needed during constant migrations.

Keywords: literary education, Holocaust, Jewish heritage, intercultural competences, history in literature

Shawn, K. (2015), How Will We Teach About Holocaust When Survivors Can No Longer Testify. Twórcze praktyki polonistyczne [Creative Polish language and literature traineeships], A. Janus-Sitarz, Kraków, 247-256.

Jakubowicz-Mount, T. (2005), W duchu pojednania. [In the spirit of reconciliation]. Dlaczego należy uczyć o Holokauście? [Why teach about the Holocaust?] K. Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, L. Hońdo, Kraków, 42-47.


Stina Thunberg (Sweden)
THE READING AVATAR: LITERACY AND GAMIFICATION

Pre-conference ARLE 2019	Tuesday, 14:30-16:00	Room T11	Chair: Coutinho, Antónia	Discussants: Coutinho (Portugal); Elf (Denmark)
Paper session ARLE 2019	Thursday, 11:00-12:30	Room T15	Chair: Skarstein, Dag

How can gaming and the digital avatar stimulate reading in literature education? This paper presents the findings of what characterizes explorative reading activities in a gamified design for the literature classroom. Although researchers have been pointing out the connection between reading fiction and playing a video game (Ryan & Thon, 2014), there is a lack of studies addressing the implementation of such game designs in the literature classrooms (Ortiz, Chiluiza, & Valcke, 2017)

The study is an educational design project with a qualitative, explorative approach doing research on the intervention (McKenney & Reeves, 2018). A design for gamification of the literature classroom is created. The target group is young people in the new media landscape. The game design legitimizes the students to act as characters in the classical novel Herr Arnes Penningar by Selma Lagerlöf by descending in the story in the form of a digital avatar. In the center of the study is the implementation with the focus on the students reading activities. The aim is to contribute to new knowledge about students reading activities in a gamified design for literature teaching, there the gaming elements avatars, quests and experience points are included. The design assumptions made there the gamified reading as a creative activity, an explorative activity and as a participatory activity. In focus in this paper is the explorative activity.

The design was implemented during spring 2018 in both the mother tongue and the second language classrooms in upper secondary school. The material is 167 avatar texts and 68 avatar films made by 48 students. Twenty-two students and four teachers were also interviewed, semi-structured. The material is analyzed by thematic coding (Mason, 1996). The preliminary results are the students explore the novel through their avatar by taking different positions in the original story and are moving around by the use of visualization, the narrative and an imitation of Lagerlöf's literary language. Through the different positions the students reinterpretate the original story and are exploring borders of gender and social class.

References
Mason, J. (1996). Qualitative researching. London: Sage.
McKenney, S., & Reeves, C., Thomas. (2018). Conducting educational design research (2nd ed.) Taylor and Francis.
Murray, J. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. The Free Press New York
Ortiz, M., Chiluiza, K., & Valcke, M. (2017). Gamification and learning performance: A systematic review of the literature.


Keywords: gamification, literature, reading


Jimmy H.M. van Rijt (Netherlands (the))
FOSTERING LINGUISTIC (META)CONCEPT USE IN SECONDARY EDUCATION. EVALUATING DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 16:30-18:00

Room T11

Chair: Awramiuk, Elżbieta

Discussants: Awramiuk (); Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the))

L1 grammar teaching as part of language education is very common around the world, but is has also been heavily debated. From a pedagogical point of view, there are many reasons to criticize traditional grammar teaching, but in this contribution, criticism from a linguistic perspective is the starting point. According to some scholars, grammar teaching should make more use of (meta)concepts from modern linguistics in order to enrich traditional grammar and thus be more linguistically up-to-date (Van Rijt, De Swart & Coppen, 2018). Even though there are good theoretical grounds to assume positive effects of such a (meta)conceptual approach, empirical evidence to support the approach is currently scarce. Following a previous study in which university students showed enhanced linguistic reasoning abilities after having undergone an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar (Van Rijt, De Swart, Wijnands & Coppen, submitted), the current study focuses on secondary education. Its main aim was to identify relevant design principles that could help secondary school teachers achieve better conceptual understanding of grammar for their students. The study consisted in a short intervention that involved 118 14-year olds and five secondary school teachers from different schools in the Netherlands. The intervention was informed by theoretical design principles and by the pedagogical advises of teachers operating in a Professional Learning Community. Prior to and after the intervention, students were asked to reason about a set of grammatical problems. The resulting analyses were rated using comparative judgement (see Pollitt, 2012). The teachers were asked to complete fidelity measures and they were interviewed in a focus group interview, in which each of the design principles was evaluated with regard to the main goal of achieving conceptual understanding. In our presentation, we will discuss the intervention, the results and conclusions of the project and future research projects.

Keywords: grammar, metaconcepts, linguistic reasoning

Pollitt, A. (2012). Comparative Judgement for assessment. International Journal of Technology and Design Education 22(2), 157-170.
Van Rijt, J., De Swart, P. & Coppen, P.-A. (2018). Linguistic concepts in L1 grammar education: a systematic literature review. Research Papers in Education.
Van Rijt, J., De Swart, P., Wijnands, A. & P.-A. Coppen (submitted). When students tackle grammatical problems. Exploring linguistic reasoning with linguistic metaconcepts in grammar education.


Astrid Wijnands (Netherlands (the))
DEVELOPING AN INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING REFLECTIVE THINKING ABOUT GRAMMAR

Pre-conference ARLE 2019

Tuesday, 16:30-18:00

Room T11

Chair: Awramiuk, Elżbieta

Discussants: Awramiuk (); Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the))

In my PhD-research ‘Working on linguistic awareness. Reflective thinking by using linguistic sources in education’, I developed a new grammar pedagogy to stimulate and facilitate a more critical and reflective attitude toward language and linguistic sources by students in pre-university education. This new pedagogy is based on Moseley et al. (2005) concerning learning cognitive thinking and on the Reflective Judgment Model of King and Kitchener (1994). It enables students to develop their thinking skills in investigating language by examining language step by step from the perspectives of language reality, language intuitions and the standard language rules. Moreover, it helps students to deal with linguistic sources such as linguistic advices and reference grammars. Those advices and reference grammars often do not give a clear answer to grammatical problems, but they present a rather nuanced analysis or balanced judgment. Based on this model, I carried out lessons in cooperation with teachers (so-called professional learning communities) in the Netherlands and in Belgium (Flanders).
In this presentation, I will focus on the development of an instrument for measuring reflective thinking about grammar. Basically, we adapted an existing questionnaire for measuring epistemological beliefs in History (Stoel 2017) for the domain of grammar. In addition to this questionnaire we also designed two assignments to analyze how students work on grammatical problems. Students from the Netherlands (N= 92) and from Belgium (N=82) and also linguistic experts from the Netherlands (N=7) completed the questionnaire. The assignments were only accomplished by the students. Based on the results on this questionnaire and on the analysis of the assignments, we developed a tool for measuring reflective thinking about grammar. In this presentation, I will outline how we designed and validated this test and these assignments. I will also show the preliminary results when using this tool in combination with our lessons we carried out in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Key words: grammar education, reflective thinking, epistemological beliefs

References
King, P.M. & Kitchener, K.S. (1994). Developing Reflective Judgement: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bas Publishers.
Moseley, D., Baumfield, V., Elliott, J., Gregson, M., Higgins, S., Miller, J., & Newton, D.P. (2005). Frameworks for thinking: A handbook for teaching and learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stoel, G.L. (2017). Teaching towards historical expertise. Developing students’ ability to reason causality in history (Doctoral dissertation). University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam.