IAIMTE 2015
Abstracts for 'Pre-conference PhD participation ARLE 2017: June 14h 2017. Register for free'

Nikki Aharonian      Professional Learning for Israeli Literacy Teachers: A Practitioner Narrative Inquiry
Joana Batalha      Can grammar benefit reading comprehension?
Eva Borgfeldt
Anna Lyngfelt     		 "I drew first then I wrote". Nine-year old students' ideas on their choice of sociosemiotic resources and conceptions of assessment, when creating multimodal texts.
Liv Fabrin      Student’s reading acts – a performative view of reading strategies
Bella Illesca      3rd person: Representing the everyday work of Australian English teachers in L1 research
Maritha Johansson      Literary socialization and literature reception - a comparative study of Swedish and French upper secondary school students’ readings of a literary text
Kristine Kabel      Reflexive literacies: L1-students resources for stance-taking in the literature classroom
Erik Karlsson      Reading professionally - what does it mean to become a Professional reader within the academicstudy of literature.
Marie-Helene Klementsson      Working with literary concepts in youth novels. Upper secondary students deal with symbols in their group discussions.
John Knipe
Kelly Dalton
Sarah Hinshaw     		 Don’t let the horse in the school!: Indigenous teachers’ perspectives of mother tongue literacies in rural Guatemala
Martijn Koek
Tanja Janssen
Gert Rijlaarsdam     		 Developing a test to assess critical thinking in the literature classroom
Uffe Ladegaard      Becoming a (multilingual) reader and writer
Helen Lehndorf      Attitudes towards literature reception of student teachers in literary study seminars
Christina Lindh      Pre conference contribution: How can writing support student´s learning processes?
Tammi G. Nadel      Reading multicultural fiction with upper secondary students: Shift in perspective and aestethic challenges
Eva I Nilson      Literary reading and identity in national examinations
Marie Dahl Rasmussen      When pupils explore subject matters together – an investigation of peer conversations in the subject Danish
Saskia Rietdijk
Daphne van Weijen
Tanja Janssen
Gert Rijlaarsdam     		 Strategy-oriented writing instruction: an intervention study in primary schools
Marloes Schrijvers
Olivia Fialho
Tanja Janssen     		 Learning about oneself and others in the literature classroom: An analysis of students’ written learner reports
Marie Thavenius      Reading Literature in Teacher Education
Anders Westerlund      Essayistic elements in the writing in upper secondary school


Nikki Aharonian (Israel)
PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR ISRAELI LITERACY TEACHERS: A PRACTITIONER NARRATIVE INQUIRY
Miscellaneous
Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O98 Discussants: Hetmar (Denmark)
As governments the world over advocate the importance of teacher professional learning, researchers and practitioners continue to explore ways to enact that learning meaningfully. Although international reports on professional development (e.g. OECD, 2005) encourage collaboration and innovative practice, there is disagreement concerning which forms of professional development (PD) should be promoted (Doecke, Parr, & North, 2008). While policy makers in many western societies are mandating standardized forms of PD, other voices call for professional learning frameworks which are responsive to the needs of teachers in particular local educational contexts (e.g. Locke, 2001). There is, for example, increasing interest in PD programs offering L1 teachers an opportunity and a guided community in which to write and share their writing (e.g. Cremin & Myhill, 2012). The rationale for these programs emphasises the value of teachers experiencing and reflecting on writing in professional communities.
This paper reports on a PhD study which reflexively explores the situated learning of cohorts of Israeli L1 literacy educators who met regularly to write and contemplate their writing pedagogy in a government endorsed PD program. In the tradition of much narrative-based practitioner inquiry in education, I was both the researcher and the leader of this program. While firmly entrenched in current Israeli PD policy, the design of this 30 hour program was dialogical and non-traditional in nature. In this narrative inquiry, I critically and reflexively explore the ways some Israeli literacy educators, who have participated in this professional conversation and reflective writing, understand professional learning and its role in their practice and emerging professional identity. Data informing the study includes: teachers’ written reflections, letters, and narratives, collected over seven years in the program, semi-structured interviews and my own research journal. I use narrative based analysis and discourse analysis methods to make sense of this data. This type of inquiry does not hold generalization as its central aim (Williams, 2004); rather it zooms in and explores the specific and the situated nature of the professional learning these teachers are experiencing.

Keywords: professional learning; teacher writing; dialogic learning, practitioner inquiry; narrative inquiry


Joana Batalha (Portugal)
CAN GRAMMAR BENEFIT READING COMPREHENSION?

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O94 Discussants: Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the)); Elf (Denmark)
Paper session Wednesday, 14:00-15:30 Room O96 Chair: Lindberg, Ylva
Context: Reading comprehension is a complex phenomenon involving different processes, from access to the meaning of words to the construction of a text representation, through processing of sentences and their integration into meaning units, as well as the interaction with the reader’s knowledge and experience (Costa 1992). In order to achieve a good level of comprehension, a reader has to automatically process lower levels of the text, which may require, with more complex or late acquired linguistic structures, a knowledge that must be explicit. It is precisely at this point that we believe that grammar teaching may play an important role. We adopt a perspective of grammar that aims at promoting students’ linguistic growth, from implicit to explicit knowledge of their language. In this perspective, grammar should be learned and developed as an autonomous object of study and, simultaneously, as an instrument for the development of oral and written skills, such as reading (Duarte 2008). Research question: Our research, based on studies that have been establishing a relation between explicit knowledge of language – or, at least, between a certain degree of awareness about the formal properties of language, referred to as linguistic awareness – and reading, tries to investigate the benefits that an explicit teaching of structures that involve dependencies (comprehension of pronouns) may bring for an improvement of reading comprehension. Method: An experimental study, divided in three stages, was conducted in a naturalistic context (L1 classroom), involving students from grades 4, 6 and 8, who were first tested on their ability to identify antecedents of pronouns in a reading task. A group of these students received then explicit teaching on certain pronouns and were tested again in a reading task similar to the first. Results and discussion: Since the study had three different stages (diagnosis, intervention and evaluation) and tested different types of pronouns, in this paper, we will present results from the first and third stages and discuss: (i) differences in the results obtained by the three groups of students as far as the ability to comprehend certain pronouns in a reading situation is concerned; (ii) possible effects of explicit teaching in reading comprehension.

Keywords: educational linguistics; reading comprehension

References:
Cain, K. & Oakhill, J. (2009). Reading Comprehension Development from 8 to 14 years. The contribution of component skills and processes. In R.K. Wagner, C. Schatschneider & C. Phythian-Sence (eds.). Beyond Decoding. The Behavioral and Biological Foundations of Reading Comprehension. New York: The Guildford Press.

Costa, A. (1992). Leitura: conhecimento linguístico e compreensão. In M.R. Delgado Martins et al. (orgs.) Para a Didáctica do Português. Seis Estudos de Linguística. Lisboa: Edições Colibri.

Costa, J. et al. (2011). Conhecimento Explícito da Língua. Guião de Implementação do Programa. Lisboa: DGIDC-ME.

Duarte, I. (2008). O conhecimento da língua: desenvolver a consciência linguística. Lisboa: DGIDC-ME.

Grabe, W. & F. Stoller (2002). Teaching and Researching Reading. London: Pearson Education.

Sim-Sim, I. (2007). O ensino da leitura. A compreensão de textos. Lisboa: DGIDC-ME.





Eva Borgfeldt & Anna Lyngfelt (Sweden)
"I DREW FIRST THEN I WROTE". NINE-YEAR OLD STUDENTS' IDEAS ON THEIR CHOICE OF SOCIOSEMIOTIC RESOURCES AND CONCEPTIONS OF ASSESSMENT, WHEN CREATING MULTIMODAL TEXTS.

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O94 Discussants: Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the)); Elf (Denmark)
Paper session Friday, 13:00-14:30 Room O99 Chair: Høegh, Tina
Research focusing multimodal aspects of children's literacy development exists, but there are few studies investigating students' own perspectives on their choice of semiotic resources and conceptions of assessment, when creating multimodal texts.

Theoretically, the study is based on linguistic sociocultural (Vygotskij, 1978; Säljö, 2014), sociosemiotic research (Kress 2003; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Løvland, 2006) and second language research (Axelsson, 1998; Cummins, 2001; Damber, 2010).

The aim of this interview study is to analyze what modalities the students prefer to use in their meaning making in multimodal text productions which will be evaluated by their teacher. The material discussed includes texts and interviews produced by nine-year old students attending public schools during the school year 2012/2013, while they were producing one multimodal text each about the Stone Age. Since the text productions already have been analyzed and reported (Borgfeldt and Lyngfelt 2014), this study includes interviews with the individual students (n=15) and focuses on the sociosemiotic resources that the students have used and which they prefer to use.

The research illustrates that most of the students – regardless of linguistic background – prefer to express themselves through images instead of written text in their text productions. If the students can choose, one third prefers to do the assignment using a computer, another third by playing it out as a play, and the rest like to complete the assignment either by making a movie or by drawing and writing with paper and pencil. Most of the students have difficulties in verbalizing their thoughts about how they will be evaluated. Even when the teacher has formulated what is being asked for from the assignment, the students do not understand how, or in what way, the teacher will evaluate their text productions. Thus, there is risk for discrepancy between the students' preferences and ideas of qualities in their multimodal meaning making, and the teacher's evaluation of their works. To decrease this risk, the students need more thorough instructions in order to understand better of what is being asked for and how the assignment will be assessed.

Key-words: multimodality, text productions, meaning-making, children's perspectives, multilingualism


Liv Fabrin (Denmark)
STUDENT’S READING ACTS – A PERFORMATIVE VIEW OF READING STRATEGIES

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O94 Discussants: Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the)); Elf (Denmark)
What do students do when they learn how to read and which literacy identities are produced together with the actions that students perform in school?
In this study ethnographic methods and performativity theory are employed in order to explore students' literacy acquisition in the Danish context of educational reforms influenced by recent PISA surveys and a political discourse on literacy crisis (Holm & Laursen 2011). The empirical basis is a range of ethnographic data which are produced among students during their years 1 to 7 in a multilingual school environment. The focus is on “reading strategies” and the study aims to work on the development of an empirically based concept of these actions for the teacher to use.
In educational policy teaching cognitive reading strategies has been introduced as one possible answer to Danish students' apparently poor performances in reading. However, the cognitive approach as well as the functional view that informs the current policy discourse on literacy has been criticized from the perspective of New Literacy Studies (Street 2003) for not taking in to consideration the sociocultural context and the complex social and linguistic practices in which literacy is taught and learned. These are processes and sometimes second language learning processes that students actively invest in when they learn (Pierce 1995) and when they engage in meaning making through the semiotic resources that are available to them in their social environment (Kenner et al. 2004).
Performativity theory (Butler 1990, 1993) appears to afford an approach that can grasp these perspectives. It implies seeing literacy acquisition processes as practices where subjectivities are produced while leaving room for the exploration of how students engage themselves in these meaning making processes.
The study is guided by the following preliminary research questions:
• Which are the performative acts that students do when they read and relate to reading. Can these acts be described as reading strategies?
• Which literacy identities are produced when the students use reading strategies?
• How can a performative concept of reading strategies unfold?

Keywords: Literacy identity, reading strategies, performativity, ethnography, post structuralism


Bella Illesca (Australia)
3RD PERSON: REPRESENTING THE EVERYDAY WORK OF AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH TEACHERS IN L1 RESEARCH

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O98 Discussants: Hetmar (Denmark)
This PhD study begins from the premise that life is a story (Arendt 1998, Bruner 2004), and that the telling and re-telling of stories helps us live our lives more consciously (Haug et al 1999). For Arendt (1998) and Cavarero (2000), the fact that human beings exist ‘in plurality’; in togetherness and in dialogue, means that the act of storytelling is political and ethical because it is relational; that is, the stories we tell and re-tell are acts of interpretation and re-interpretation that occur between the ‘self’ and ‘in relation’ to others (Bruner 2004). A focus on story telling has the potential to offer more humanizing ways of understanding the lives of others, and methodologically gestures towards approaches to research that provoke and interrupt knowledge, rather than claiming to present the ’truth’ (Britzman and Pitt, 2003).

Through this research project I explore the stories that English teachers tell about their professional lives as a way of problematizing the epistemological and ethical assumptions inherent in current representations of the everyday work of English teachers in Australia, in particular the emphasis on ‘evidence’ prompted by standards-based reforms. From the perspective of standards-based reforms, the stories teachers tell are simply anecdotal, too closely tied to particular settings to have any ‘truth’ value. I argue that, to the contrary, the richly concrete character of teachers’ stories provides insights into their situation as educators that is overlooked by the ‘evidence’ of policy makers.

I focus on the stories that English teachers constructed through collaborative ‘Writing as a method of inquiry’ (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005) and ‘Memory Work’ (Haug et al 1999) workshops, as a way of ‘living historically’ (Haug et al, 1999); that is, as a way of remembering how we have been made and how we have contributed to that making and go on contributing. In this way I endeavour to restore ‘the absent subject and absent experience’ (Smith, 1987, p. 107), the ‘unformed’ and ‘spontaneous’ (Lefebvre 2008), to representations of the professional practices of teachers of English. The teachers’ stories discussed in this presentation all derive from writing workshops and interviews that I have conducted with teachers in the course of my research.

Keywords: Story-telling, professional identity, meaning-making, representation, teaching and learning, standards-based reforms,

References:
Arendt, H. 1998, The Human Condition. Chicago University Press: Chicago.
Britzman D., & Pitt, A., Speculations on Qualities of Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research, International Journal of Qualitative Studies In Education, 16, (6), 755-776.
Bruner, J., 2004, Life as Narrative. Social Research, Vol 71: No 3.
Cavarero, A. 2000, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, USA:Routledge.
Haug, F., S. Andresen, et al. 1999, Female Sexualisation: A Collective Work of Memory, London:Verso.
Lefebvre, H., 2008, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Vol. 2, London/NewYork: Verso.
Richardson, L., and St Pierre, E., 2005, Writing: A Method of Inquiry in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd Edition). Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage, pp. 959-978.
Smith, D., 1987, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. NOrtheastern University Press: Boston.



Maritha Johansson (Sweden)
LITERARY SOCIALIZATION AND LITERATURE RECEPTION - A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SWEDISH AND FRENCH UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ READINGS OF A LITERARY TEXT

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O97 Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Janssen (Netherlands (the)); Høegh (Denmark)
Paper session Friday, 10:30-12:00 Room O77 Chair: Hansen, Thomas I.
Keywords: literary socialization, literature reception, interpretation, literary concepts, upper secondary school

My paper is a summary of the most important results of my thesis (scheduled autumn 2015). The aim of the dissertation is to study how upper secondary school students in two different countries with different school systems react to a literary text and to discuss this in terms of the influence of literary socialization on their reception of the text. The empirical material consists of 223 texts – a commentary on a short story – written by students from eight upper secondary schools in five different cities in Sweden and in France. Two main factors are taken into consideration in the discussion: the potential effect of literary socialization through education and the importance of the structures of the literary text as a condition for the reception. The thesis will present three different angles, with a different theoretical framework. Literary socialization is related to sociocultural theories of learning (Vygotsky 1978, Säljö 2010). Literature reception is related to theories about interaction between the reader and the text and interpretation (Iser 1978; Eco 1984; Culler 1975; Ricœur 1981; Gervais 2001; Tauveron 2001; Agrell 2009). The set of literary conceptual tools is discussed in relation to both sociocultural and cognitive aspects but also inspired by studies about concepts in natural sciences (Lemke 1990; Wyndham 2002; Halldén 2002).

The analysis of the students' texts shows that there are differences between the two nations, which can be explained by literary socialization. Different school systems socialize the students into different ways of handling the meeting with the literary text. Swedish students have a more personal and open way of interacting with the literary text, while French students are more technical and use literary concepts to a higher extent. Both ways can however lead to misunderstanding and it seems that a combination of a personal and an analytic reading is the most efficient way of dealing with the literary text. These results will be more profoundly discussed in the presentation.


Kristine Kabel (Denmark)
REFLEXIVE LITERACIES: L1-STUDENTS RESOURCES FOR STANCE-TAKING IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O97 Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Janssen (Netherlands (the)); Høegh (Denmark)
Keywords: Literature education, stance-taking, reflection literacy, lower secondary school, qualitative case studies

Making aspects of privileged ways of participating visible is central to supporting students’ literacy development within different disciplines. However, educational linguistics and literacy studies on students’ meaning-making resources in lower secondary school indicate that some significant resources within literature education in L1 at this stage of schooling are often part of an invisible curriculum (Christie, 2012; Folkeryd, 2007; Macken-Horarik, 2006; Penne, 2006). Suggesting that L1 emphasizes a knower code, and thus students’ attitudes and dispositions, more than a knowledge code (Maton, 2010), I investigate students’ resources for stance-taking in their literary response texts as well as their metadiscourses on literature education (Christie & Derewianka, 2010; Hood, 2010, 2011; Hunston & Thompson, 2001; Jaffe, 2009; Macken-Horarik & Morgan, 2011; Martin & White, 2005). Additionally, two aspects of the pedagogical context are considered: what degree of openness exists in the activities in which students are invited to participate, and with which meaning-making resources are students invited to participate (Gibbons, 2006; Kress, 2010). The purpose of the project is to develop a metalanguage adequate to characterise interpersonal aspects of students’ actual meaning-making resources, a metalanguage that can support discussions of privileged ways of participating and of co-constructing L1, and thereby also support the lower secondary teacher in a visible pedagogic.
The investigation is inspired by social semiotic notions of reflection literacy (Hasan, 1996, 2011) and critical literacy (Gee, 2012; Gibbons, 2006; Macken-Horarik, 1996), which emphasize students’ meta knowledge and agency as central elements in a liberating learning process. The dynamic interrelationship between students’ meaning-making resources and the pedagogical context is an integral part of this theoretical framework.
The study involves participant observation throughout one school year (three Year 8 classes) and the sampled data consist of students’ written texts, student interviews, video recorded classroom observations and field notes.
Preliminary results show a variety in students’ resources for stance-taking, specifically in regard to what extent other voices are integrated in texts, and they show a pattern in students’ linguistic choices in the literature classroom and their metadiscourses. These results indicate a potential for making visible certain meaning-making resources in literature education in lower secondary school.

Literature

Christie, F. (2012). Language education throughout the school years: A functional perspective. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Christie, F., & Derewianka, B. (2010). School discourse : learning to write across the years of schooling (Paperback ed. ed.). London: Continuum.
Folkeryd, J. W. (2007). Writing with an attitude: Appraisal and student texts in the school subject of Swedish. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Gee, J. P. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies. Ideology in discourses (4 ed.). New York: Routledge.
Gibbons, P. (2006). Bridging discourses in the ESL Classroom. Students, teachers and researchers. New York: Continuum.
Hasan, R. (1996). Literacy, everyday talk and society. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in Society. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Publishing Company.
Hasan, R. (2011). Literacy pedagogy and social change: directions from Bernsteins sociology [2007]. In J. J. Webster (Ed.), Language and Education. Learning and Teaching in Society. The collected works of Ruqaiya Hasan (Vol. 3). London: equinox.
Hood, S. (2010). Appraising research: Evaluation in Academic Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hood, S. (2011). Writing Discipline: Comparing Inscriptions of Knowledge and Knowers in Academic Writing Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. New York: Continuum.
Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (2001). Evaluation in text : Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaffe, A. M. (2009). Stance : Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality : A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge.
Macken-Horarik, M. (1996). Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register for secondary school teachers. In H. Ruqaiya & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in Society. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Publishing Company.
Macken-Horarik, M. (2006). Hierarchies in Diversities: What students’ examined responses tell us about literacy practices in contemporary school English. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 29(1), 52-78.
Macken-Horarik, M., & Morgan, W. (2011). Towards a metalanguage adequate to linguistic achievement in post-structuralism and English: Reflections on voicing in the writing of secondary students. Linguistics and Education, 22(2), 95-194.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation : Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maton, K. (2010). Canons and Progress in the Arts and Humanities: Knowers and Gazes. In K. Maton & R. Moore (Eds.), Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education. New York: Continuum.
Penne, S. (2006). Profesjonsfaget norsk i en endringstid : norsk på ungdomstrinnet : å konstruere mening, selvforståelse og identitet gjennom språk og tekster : fagets rolle i et identitetsperspektiv, i et likhet- og ulighetsperspektiv. Oslo: Det utdanningsvitenskapelige fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo.


Erik Karlsson (Sweden)
READING PROFESSIONALLY - WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BECOME A PROFESSIONAL READER WITHIN THE ACADEMICSTUDY OF LITERATURE.

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O96 Discussants: Janssen (Netherlands (the))
My thesis will focus on “professional readers”, meaning those who study literature within the academic system. I will follow a group of students during their first year of studying Comparative Literature. Though studies of the reading of literature have become more common in recent years, we still know little about how this group of readers actually understand their reading of literature. I hope to make a contribution in this regard.
My study is part of the project "The Dialectics of Immersion – on Professional and Everyday Reading Practices in the new Media Landscape” which consists of four studies, each looking at what we might call "passionate readers” from a different angle. We try to apprehend relationships and boundaries between reading as it is practiced within and outside academia. The material ranges from private reading circles and “Mass Literature Events” to my study of students of Comparative Literature.

Materials:

The material for the thesis (material is currently being collected) consists of qualitative data, including interviews with students at several points in their education, interviews with a number of teachers and ethnographic observational studies in lecture rooms at the university. Various types of written material is also included, such as texts produced by the students (papers, exams), material provided as hand-outs from the teachers, and texts made available to students through the university’s digital educational platform.

Research Methods:

Although the exact methods still are being drawn up, I do have a preliminary understanding of what my methods will be. The methods can very broadly be divided into two categories:
1: A collection of conventional ethnographic methods, such as observations and interviews.
2: The other category concerns my way of understanding and analyzing the data. I am contemplating using some form of socio-material theory such as Actor Network Theory (ANT) as a way of including the “materiality” of reading into the study, a perspective that has been overlooked in many recent educational studies. The objective is to rethink the way educational studies generally has dealt with the concept of agency.

Keywords: Literature Didactics, Qualitative Studies, Reading Reception, Ethnography, Actor Network Theory


Marie-Helene Klementsson (Sweden)
WORKING WITH LITERARY CONCEPTS IN YOUTH NOVELS. UPPER SECONDARY STUDENTS DEAL WITH SYMBOLS IN THEIR GROUP DISCUSSIONS.

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O97 Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Janssen (Netherlands (the)); Høegh (Denmark)
My thesis is an empirical teacher-researcher study based upon the transcriptions from the tape-recorded group discussions in a class in a Swedish upper secondary school. The class consisted of 36 students which were divided into six groups. The group discussions were carried out without a teacher present but the students worked with text focused tasks and questions which I had prepared in advance. The first recordings, out of a total of 15 per group, were carried out in August 2011 and the last ones in May 2012. The novels the students read and then discussed were part of two literature projects namely Robinsonades and Teenage pregnancy.
In the first study I present the results of two groups’ discussions of the novel The Hungergames. The results show that different Joint Approaches were being used when the students worked with the novels and the designated tasks and questions to it. This study presents six of them.
The second study focuses on how the students in their discussions deal with literary concepts in terms of how they, through the concepts, talk about the novels they read. This study analyzes five of the groups’ conversations about symbols in the four youth novels they read and it will examine if or how the students’ dealing with the concept changes throughout the school year. This, the second article in my coming thesis, is what I will present at the workshop.


John Knipe & Kelly Dalton & Sarah Hinshaw (United States)
DON’T LET THE HORSE IN THE SCHOOL!: INDIGENOUS TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES OF MOTHER TONGUE LITERACIES IN RURAL GUATEMALA

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O98 Discussants: Hetmar (Denmark)
Paper session Friday, 13:00-14:30 Room U43 Chair: Bundsgaard, Jeppe
In Guatemala, a variety of language policies that have supported or outlawed Mayan language use and mother tongue education in classrooms have gone through cycles of being implemented, overturned, and abolished for the past 500 years. Currently, language rights for the indigenous Mayans have been an important component in the fight to prevent language loss. Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) and the concept of interculturality originated in Latin America around the 1970’s. Interculturality “points to the radical restructuring of the historically pronounced uneven relations of wealth and power that have existed between Europeans and their descendants and indigenous and other subordinated groups during the last half millennium” (Medina-Lopez-Portillo & Sinnigen, 2009, p .25). Interculturality aims at both strengthening indigenous ethnic cultural identity while questioning relations between majority and minority, indigenous cultures (Tubino, 2013). Situated in the rural Highland region of Guatemala lies a school whose mission is the propagation of Ixil, an endangered indigenous Mayan language, through an additive bilingual system that employs mother tongue instruction. This includes the use of Ixil books written by the teachers themselves.

In order to gain a better understanding of the indigenous teachers’ perspectives of language, culture, and interculturality, three researchers conducted a qualitative case study guided by the following research questions: (1) How do teachers perceive their own understanding of attitudes and beliefs about language and culture? (2) How do they perceive their role in intercultural bilingual education? (3) In what ways do teachers teach culture and language in the classroom?
Data collection consisted primarily of in-depth, semi-structured and informal interviews; supplemented by observations conducted by the researchers who served the dual role of participant/observer. Interviews were analyzed using constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2006). Major themes that emerged across the participants included: (1) the role of formal education and mother tongue education in language revitalization, and (2) teachers expressed their agency through the collaborative process of creating books representing the Ixil language and culture.

Keywords: language revitalization, literacy, Guatemala


Martijn Koek & Tanja Janssen & Gert Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the))
DEVELOPING A TEST TO ASSESS CRITICAL THINKING IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Round table & Interaction Thursday, 09:00-10:30 Room U81 Chair: Høegh, Tina
 Discussants: Igland (Norway); Høegh (Denmark)
Background:
Recent studies indicate that reading literary fiction might foster thinking skills and dispositions that contribute to critical thinking (CT), defined by Ennis (1997) as ‘reasonable reflective thinking, focused on deciding what to believe or do’.
Research Aims:
The aims of the study are 1) to determine which CT skills could be evoked by literary assignments; 2) to develop a test to assess CT in a literary context (CTLC)
Sample:
Participants are students of one secondary school in the Netherlands (N=550, grades 10-12, pre-university education) who followed a program structured around reading literary novels thematically and interpreting them in differentiated reading groups.
Methods:
Based upon a literature review we developed and administered a test to assess critical thinking in response to literature. This test consists of eight assignments in which students are asked to make judgments, for instance about the appropriateness of a poem for a particular occasion. The test was examined for reliability in a pilot study. Second, two other tests were administered: 1) a thinking disposition test, consisting of three scales: Need for Cognition, Actively Open-minded Thinking (AOT) and Tolerance for Ambiguity (TFA); 2) the Cornell Critical Thinking Test level X (CCTT) to assess CT skills.
Results:
Preliminary results (N=72) show high interrater reliability (r=.97, p<0.01) and acceptable internal reliability for the CTLC (Cronbach’s Alpha .64), as well as an indication of validity (r=.62, p<0.01) between the CTLC and the CCTT. Grade 12 students scored higher on the CTLC (mean 14.7; SD 2.7) than students in grade 10 (mean 9.7; SD 2.7) and 11 (mean 6.8; SD 3.9).

Keywords: Literature education, Critical Thinking, Assessment

References:
Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 116-131.
Djikic, M., Oatley, K. & Moldeveanu, M.C. (2013). Opening the closed mind: the effect of exposure to literature on the need for closure. Creativity research journal , 25(2), 149-154.
Ennis, R. H. (1993). Critical thinking assessment. Theory into Practice, 32(3), 179-186.
Ennis, R. H., Millman, J., & Tomko, T. N. (1985). Cornell critical thinking tests level X & level Z: Manual. Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
Facione, P. (1990). Critical thinking: A statement of expert consensus for purposes of educational assessment and instruction. Millibrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
Garcia, T. & Pintrich, P.R. (1992). Critical Thinking and Its Relationship to Motivation,
Learning Strategies, and Classroom Experience. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (100th, Washington, DC, August 14-18, 1992).
Hakemulder, J. (2000). The moral laboratory: experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-knowledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012). Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(1), 1-19.
Kidd, D.C. & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science 342 (6156), 377-380.
Kohlberg, L. (1963). The development of children’s orientations toward a moral order. I. Sequence in the development of human thought. Vita Humana (Human development), 6, 11-33.
Nussbaum, M. (2012). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schulhauser, C.E. (1990) The effect of literary discussion groups on students' critical thinking ability and attitude toward reading. PhD Diss. Pullman: Washington State University, 1990.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2007). Natural myside bias is independent of cognitive ability. Thinking & Reasoning, 13(3), 225-247.
Wass, Harland en Mercer (2011). Scaffolding critical thinking in the zone of proximal development. Higher Education Research & Development, 30 (3), 317-328.
Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049-1062
Witte, T. (2008). Het oog van de meester: een onderzoek naar de literaire ontwikkeling van HAVO- en VWO-scholieren in de tweede fase van het voortgezet onderwijs. [The eye of the master: a research of the literary development of secondary school students in grade 10-12] Delft: Eburon.





Uffe Ladegaard (Denmark)
BECOMING A (MULTILINGUAL) READER AND WRITER

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O94 Discussants: Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the)); Elf (Denmark)
The project is a four years part time study starting in September 2013.

The aim of the project is to investigate and understand how multilingual children become readers and writers in the Danish education.

Research questions:
• How do multilingual readers and writers develop identities as participants or non-participants in formal educational settings?
• How do these students gain access to or non-access to the literacy practices in the school?

The study is based on an on going longitudinal study of literacy in multilingual classrooms called ‘Signs of language’. The main part of my data material comes from this project. The empirical basis is collected over a period of seven years in one class and consists of video-based classroom observation, field notes, pictures, interviews with the students and what can be characterized as quasi-experimental activities. Furthermore I have access to multi-modal products made by the students.

In practice I am following two multilingual children in the first eight years of their schooling. The study has two components:
1. An analysis of the video-based classroom observations, interviews and the quasi-experimental activities for an understanding of the trajectories of identities as readers and writers which the two students makes.
2. An analysis of their multimodal products in order to understand the linguistic transformations that occurs during this period.

The project takes a social perspective on the development of language and literacy and draw on a social semiotic perspective (Kress 1997) and the New Literacy Studies (eg. Barton 1994, Barton and Hamilton 2003). To understand the relation between literacy and identity I draw on what Packer (2001) refers to as the ‘ontological’ approach to learning (se also Lave 1993, Wenger 1998, Wortham 2005) where academic learning and social identification are seen as interrelated processes.

Key-words:
Signs of literacy identity
Timescales
Trajectories
Social identification processes
Semiotic Transformations


Helen Lehndorf (Germany)
ATTITUDES TOWARDS LITERATURE RECEPTION OF STUDENT TEACHERS IN LITERARY STUDY SEMINARS

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O96 Discussants: Janssen (Netherlands (the))
Structured poster session Thursday, 11:00-12:30 Room O77 Chair: Liberg, Caroline
In my PhD project I want to explore student teachers paradigms and the attitudes they hold regarding the possibilities and principles of literature reception in the field of literary studies. The wide variety of research in the field of psychology and education concerning individuals conceptions of knowledge and knowing (“epistemological beliefs”) serves as a starting point for my research (Hofer & Bendixen 2011). As has been shown by numerous studies, student teachers are confronted with different knowledge cultures during their education (Hofer 2004, Perry 1970). Especially in the ill structured domains, students have to cope with ambiguity, diversity and contradictions regarding the principles of knowledge acquisition in the field. Besides, habitus and attitudes towards knowledge and knowledge acquisition and towards literature reception they adopted in school may be irritated by academic teaching and learning practices and therefore become subject to change (Wieser 2013, Hofer 2011, Bendixen 2010, Perry 1970). Furthermore, student teachers often anticipate their future teaching practice and therefore experience a tension between a scientific attitude towards knowing and knowledge and their own learning needs and expectations.
Regarding the multiple tensions student teachers may experience during their studies the study aims at examining the attitudes and beliefs students develop within the outlined areas. The study is designed as a reconstructive case study in which protocols of seminar discussion with student teachers of different semester are analysed according to the principles of objective hermeneutics.

Keywords: epistemological beliefs, student attitudes, literature reception, objective hermeneutics, case study

References:
BENDIXEN, L. D. & FEUCHT, F. C. (Hrsg.) 2010: Personal epistemology in the classroom: theory, research, and implications for practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HOFER, B. K. 2004: Exploring the Dimensions of Personal Epistemology in Differing Classroom Contexts: Student Interpretations during the First Year of College. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 29, 129-163.
HOFER, B. K. & BENDIXEN, L. D. 2011: Personal Epistemology: Theory, Reserach, and Future Direction. In: HARRIS, K. R., GRAHAM, S. & URDAN, T. (Hrsg.) APA Educational Psychology Handbook. Washington: APA, 227-257.
PERRY, W. G., JR. 1970: Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme., New York, Holt, Rinehard and Winston.
WIESER, D. 2013: Was macht einen literarischen Experten aus? Epistemologische Konzepte von Schülerinnen und Schülern. In: RIECKMANN, C. & GAHN, J. (Hrsg.) Poesie verstehen - Literatur unterrichten. . Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag, 159-178.


Christina Lindh (Sweden)
PRE CONFERENCE CONTRIBUTION: HOW CAN WRITING SUPPORT STUDENT´S LEARNING PROCESSES?

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O95 Discussants: Piekut (Denmark); Krogh (Denmark)
The thesis is about to investigate how a group of teachers, teaching different subjects in primary school, grade 7-9, construct, implement and evaluate, various writing activities with their students in order to understand how these activities can support the learning processes or the meaning making processes. The writing activities also involve the changing conditions for reading and writing in school education, and the use of texts that are multimodal, as a result of the development in media technology. The thesis is also focusing on how the writing is affected depending on the discourse of school subject.

According to the purpose of the thesis the following research questions are asked:
• How can teaching support student´s learning processes / meaning making processes by
designing various writing activities in different school subjects?

• In what way does activities involving collaborative writing affect the learning process / the
meaning making process?

• What do students think about how writing activities in different school subjects can support
the learning processes / the meaning making processes?

• What do teachers discuss concerning how the use of writing activities in their teaching can
support student´s learning processes / meaning making processes in different school
subjects?

The empirical material will involve observations of lessons, both audio recorded and film recorded, field notes from the observations and recordings of the teacher´s discussions during their weekly meetings while constructing the lessons. The empirical material also includes teacher´s field notes student´s text and interviews with teachers.

Theoretical perspectives of the thesis is a socio cultural view of learning by reading and writing. Methods that can be used for analyse needs to be discussed but can involve a design based research method (Selander & Kress) or the use of discourse analysis.

Keywords: language based learning activities, meaning making processes, writing to learn, collaborative writing /learning, intervention studies, design theory based research.


Tammi G. Nadel (Sweden)
READING MULTICULTURAL FICTION WITH UPPER SECONDARY STUDENTS: SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE AND AESTETHIC CHALLENGES

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O97 Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Janssen (Netherlands (the)); Høegh (Denmark)
Structured poster session Thursday, 11:00-12:30 Room O77 Chair: Liberg, Caroline
Literature education in Sweden today faces new challenges due to a shift in curriculum (2011) as well as the fact that the students reflect an increasingly globalized world. However, teachers in Sweden rarely, if ever, introduce literature in the classroom that moves beyond the Western canon (Statens kulturråd 2004). One of the aims of literature education is to give the students opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of themselves, as well as others, through fiction (Lgr 11, Gy 11). However, previous research show that since students tend to read and interpret fiction from their own perspective and personal experience, making connections to texts from cultures very different from their own proves to be difficult (Beach 1998, Beach, Heartling & Parks 2008, Cruz, Jordan et.al. 2010, Dong 2005, Louie 2006). This on going study aims to explore and describe what strategies and tools Swedish upper secondary students need in order to read and interpret short stories from Kenya and South Africa on different levels; as windows to the world and as fictional aesthetic texts.

The study is set up with a transformative agenda as an intervention study based on a synthesis of theory (Barab and Squire 2004). A qualitative case study design was adopted with the features of being interventionist (a design set up as part of everyday school practise with the aim of improving it), collaborative (the teachers are included in the discussion of the design) and iterative. By its design the study will hopefully contribute with some insights into the teaching of multicultural fiction and possibly on a small-scale decrease the theory-practice gap in education (Degerman 2013, Reichenberg 2012). During the first cycle (spring 2014) the group of students was homogeneous, highly motivated students with similar socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, with a special interest in global issues, which was their school’s profile. In contrast, the students during the second cycle (autumn 2014) were from a different school, heterogeneous in all aspects and many had a documented reluctance to reading fiction.

The fiction chosen for the study originated from cultures that were unfamiliar for most of the students, as well as having a challenging literary form. Different short stories where used for cycle one (Kenya) and cycle two (South Africa) as a result of the practising teacher’s belief that the first text was too long and would discourage the students even before reading. The focus of analysis is the students written texts, but data includes field notes, recorded group conversations and a survey.

Preliminary results indicate that in order to connect to the texts, the students are helped by pre-reading information about the history and society of the texts they read. Also, reading strategies, such as asking questions to the text, particularly help students who are unfamiliar with reading complex fiction. The study also implies a need for the students to practise a shift in perspectives and be made aware that they, as individuals, as well as the fictional characters, are affected by their surrounding society and circumstances which in turn can explain norms, believes and actions in a specific context.

keywords: reading, multicultural literature, interpretation, intervention study


Barab, S., & Squire, K. (2004). Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground. (S. Barab & K. Squire, Eds.) The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 1-14.

Beach, R. (1998). Constructing real and text worlds in responding to literature, Theory Into Practice, 37:3, 176-185. doi: 10.1080/00405849809543803

Beach, R., Thein, A.H. & Parks, D. (2007). High school students' competing social worlds: negotiating identities and allegiances in response to multicultural literature. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cobb, P. Confrey, J, diSessa, A., Lehrer, R and Schauble, L. (2003). Design Experiments in Educational Research, Educational Researcher, (32:1),9-13.

Cruz, G., Jordan, S. et.al. (2010). Beyond the Culture Tours. Studies in Teaching and Learning with Culturally Diverse Texts. Routledge:New York.

Degerman, P. (2012). Litteraturen, det är vad man undervisar om: det svenska litteraturdidaktiska fältet i förvandling. Diss. Åbo : Åbo Akademi, 2013. Åbo.

Dong, Ren. (2005) Taking a Cultural response approach to teaching mulitcultural literature. The English Journal, (94:3) 55-60.

Lgr 11. Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2011. Stockholm: Skolverket.

Gy 11. Läroplan för gymnasieskolan 2011. Stockholm: Skolverket.

Louie, Belinda Y., (2006). Simply exposing children to multicultural literature may lead to indifference, lack of understanding and even resistence. The Reading Teacher, (59:5), 438–448.

Reichenberg, M. (2012). Texter, läsförståelse och läsundervisning i Norge och Sverige - en översikt. Acta Didactica Norge, 6(3), 1-24. Retrieved from http://adno.no/index.php/adno/article/download/187/216

Statens Kulturråd (2004). Världslitteraturen i skolan - ett uppdrag från Statens Kulturråd till Barnängens världsbibliotek (Dnr 804/02-224).


Eva I Nilson (Sweden)
LITERARY READING AND IDENTITY IN NATIONAL EXAMINATIONS

Paper session Tuesday, 17:20-18:00 Room unknown Discussants: Pieper (Germany); Janssen (Netherlands (the)); Høegh (Denmark)
Structured poster session Thursday, 11:00-12:30 Room O77 Chair: Liberg, Caroline
My thesis is about reading and writing as a forum for displaying identity within the school subject of Swedish. Identity is a central concept in the curriculum, which states that the student will strengthen his/her individual and cultural identity through language and different media (Skolverket 1994, 2011). In my licentiate thesis from 2012 I examined how the student writes about himself/herself in national examinations (Nilson 2012). The study focused on how the students build their stories dramaturgically (Labov 1972) and what kind of self-categorization they use (Benwell & Stokoe 2006), in order to satisfy the school context.
The second part of my dissertation project will focus on literary reading. The study analyses the assessment of literary reading through a historical perspective on national examinations, from 1968 and onward. What constancies can we see in the examinations and what has changed over time?
The project is situated within a discourse analytical framework (Foucault 1971/1993). The licentiate thesis used methods mainly from narrative analysis with the life story in focus (Linde 1993), and established links to a social and historical context (Cameron 2000, Giddens 1997/2008, Foucault 1974/1987). The continuation of the study has the same framework, but literary reading here is analysed primarily on how reading literature and literary skills are requested in the national examinations. Also, how the assignments invite the student to enter into dialogues with different subject positions (Skei 1997, Davies & Harré 1990, Harré & Van Langenhove 1991), is analysed.
The preliminary results from my second study indicate that the reading of literary texts requires a technical analytical reading (Mehrstam 2009), focusing on the idea that the student must enter into dialogue with the author's subject, especially in the tests from the 1970’s and 1980’s. Also, as the tests are organised thematically, the theme provides a guideline in how both the texts and the world can be understood through reading literature, by way of the presentation of the assignment. In the later tests, from the 1990’s and 2000’s, what is required is mainly a valuation of the literary text. In the more recent tests, from 2011 and onwards, reading of literature is tested with a clear focus on technical analytical readings again, but this time as a test of reading comprehension.

Keywords: identity construction, subject positions, literary reading

References:
Cameron, Deborah. 2000. Good to talk? London: Sage Publication.
Davies, Bronwyn & Harré, Rom. 1990. ”Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves” In Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20, 43-63.
Foucault, Michel. 1971/1993. Diskursens ordning. (The Order of Things). Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag.
Foucault, Michel. 1974/1987. Övervakning och straff. (Discipline and Punish). Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag.
Giddens, Anthony. 1997/2008. Modernitet och självidentitet. Självet och samhället i den senmoderna epoken. (Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age). Göteborg: Daidalos.
Harré, Rom & Van Langenhove, Luk. 1991. ”Varieties of Positioning” In Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour 21, 393-407.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life stories. The creation of coherence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mehrstam, Christian. 2009. Textteori för läsforskare. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet. Institutionen för Litteratur, Idéhistoria och Religion.
Nilson, Eva. 2012. Skrivande som identitetsskapande aktivitet i skolan- innehåll och begränsningar. (Students’ writing as identity construction in a school context- content and limitations). Institutionen för språkdidaktik. Stockholms universitet.
Skei,H Hans. 1997. Subjekt i skrift In Den moderna litteraturteorin. (Subject in Writing In The modern literary Theory). Ed. Melberg Arne. u.o: Dejavu.
Skolverket, Läroplaner i svenska. 1994, 2011. (The National Agency for Education, Curriculum for the upper secondary school.


Marie Dahl Rasmussen (Denmark)
WHEN PUPILS EXPLORE SUBJECT MATTERS TOGETHER – AN INVESTIGATION OF PEER CONVERSATIONS IN THE SUBJECT DANISH

Key-words: Classroom conversations, peer groups in primary class room, the didactics of speech and listening, social semiotics, intervention research.

My project investigates the conversations among pupils in the context of the subject Danish. The purpose is to examine how certain interventions and didactically designed contextual factors can contribute to making these conversations productive in terms of stimulating pupils to discuss subject-relevant ideas and understandings. The theoretical framework is social semiotic theory and the data will be collected and produced using participant observation. In June 2015, where the Iaimte-conference takes place, I will be in the startup phase of the project and my presentation will for this reason focus mainly on the design and the methodological framework of the PhD.

The project is designed as a qualitative study with two phases. The main part is an explorative examination of the way pupils talk with each other when working in small groups in three primary school classrooms. In the second phase I will do interventions in the same classes in collaboration with their teachers. The purpose of the interventions is to get more information on how to initiate af scaffold the peer conversation in a way that makes the pupils investigate and explore the relevant subject matter as well as ennabling them to use the conversation to deepen their comprehension and expand their subject-relevant vocabulary. In the pre-conference I would like to present my methods for collecting data. I will present the tools and frames for observations and my thoughts on how to cooperate with the schools and teachers during the project. Relying on experiences from anthropology and design-based research, I would like to discuss how I will attempt to balance data collection on the one hand, and actual interventions on the other. Furthermore, I will present the social semiotic theory, which I plan to use for the analyses of the peer group conversations.


Saskia Rietdijk & Daphne van Weijen & Tanja Janssen & Gert Rijlaarsdam (Netherlands (the))
STRATEGY-ORIENTED WRITING INSTRUCTION: AN INTERVENTION STUDY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Paper session Tuesday, 14:00-15:20 Room O95 Discussants: Piekut (Denmark); Krogh (Denmark)
According to the national inspectorate the quality of writing education in Dutch primary schools is poor, and national assessment research indicates students’ writing level is insufficient at the end of primary education. Meta-analyses of educational research have identified effective approaches for writing instruction, however. Strategy instruction, in particular, is highly effective.

Background
The present study is part of ongoing research in primary schools, aimed at the improvement of writing education in grades 4 to 6. The design is experimental, with three conditions: two intervention groups and a control group. In both intervention groups writing is taught through lessons that focus on the acquisition of strategies. In one group teachers are also trained.
We hypothesize that both interventions groups will outperform the control group, and that the training group will outperform the other intervention group.
Data are collected three times a year for two years, regarding teacher variables, the quality of writing lessons and students’ writing performance.

Methodology
In 2013-2014 data were collected from forty-three teachers and their students, using a mixed-methods approach. Teacher variables were measured through a questionnaire and an interview. Information on the quality of writing lessons was obtained from these interviews and lesson observations. Students’ writing was measured in four different genres.

Research questions
In this presentation the effects of the first intervention year are discussed. The following research questions will be answered:
1) Do the teacher variables (cognitions, attitudes, skills) in the intervention groups change more than the teacher variables in the control group?
2) Does the students’ writing performance in the intervention groups improve more than the students’ writing performance in the control group?
3) Is there an additional effect of teacher training?
The pre-test data have been analysed. The remaining data will be analysed before June.

Relevance
This study demonstrates whether a strategy focussed writing intervention is effective in a Dutch context and whether it is wise to add a training component. This is important to know, if one wants to improve writing education.


Marloes Schrijvers & Olivia Fialho & Tanja Janssen (Netherlands (the))
LEARNING ABOUT ONESELF AND OTHERS IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM: AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ WRITTEN LEARNER REPORTS

Paper session Tuesday, 17:20-18:00 Room O96 Discussants: Pieper (Germany)
Reading literary fiction may change how we think of ourselves (self-perceptions) and others (social perceptions): it may lead to deepened self-understandings (Sikora, Miall & Kuiken, 2011; Fialho, 2012), increased Theory of Mind (Kidd & Castano, 2013), empathy (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013) and moral competence (Hakemulder, 2000). Literature education might foster such experiences of change, but this claim has never been investigated. Therefore, this study aims at exploring whether Dutch students (grades 10-12, N=350) report any experiences of change in self-perceptions and social perceptions as a result of literature education.

To this purpose, participants complete a reflective writing assignment: the learner report. This instrument explicates learning experiences that remain implicit in other measures and was found to be valid and reliable in previous research (Van Kesteren, 1993; Janssen, 1998). Participants are asked to write down what they have learned (noticed, discovered, found out) about others and themselves through class activities in literature education and through reading literary fiction for school.

Since Lexical Basis for Numerically-Aided Phenomenology (or LEX-NAP; Fialho, 2012) is demonstrably effective in grasping self-transformative experiences, it is used as method of data analysis. It enables inductive examination of students’ experiences, focusing not only on what experiences of change students report, as is done in traditional content analysis, but also on how they report them. For instance, use of personal pronouns, intensifiers, vague language and metaphors may indicate specific experiences of change. To assess inter-rater reliability, part of the learner reports will be analyzed by a second rater.

Data analysis is currently in progress and results will be presented at the conference.


Marie Thavenius (Sweden)
READING LITERATURE IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O96 Discussants: Pieper (Germany)
For the past century literature has been an important part of L1 teaching in Swedish schools and it has also been one of the major parts in teacher education for future teachers of Swedish, but the development of digital communication media is raising questions like: What is literature? What is reading? Is literature important today? Should literature continue to hold a unique position in mother tongue education at school and in teacher education? The topic of my thesis is therefore the reading of literature in teacher education.
The research area for my PhD-project is Educational Sciences and more specifically The Theory and Practice of Teaching and Learning Swedish. The purpose of my study is to explore the reading of literature in teacher education (for future teachers of Swedish). My research questions are focused on why we are reading literature in teacher education and the views among students and teachers of this matter. How can these views be understood? What texts are being read? How are the texts being read? What reading practices are being encouraged?
I have an overall social constructionist view with a qualitative approach because my purpose is to explore and understand the meaning the teacher students ascribe to reading, studying and teaching literature. My research design is inspired by ethnography. That means that I have been studying one group of teacher students during the last two years of their education programme. My research data consists of audio-taped lectures, seminars, small group discussions and oral examinations. I have also had interviews with students and teachers. Other data is syllabi for the courses of Swedish in the teacher education, but also the national subject syllabus for Swedish at upper secondary school.
In analyzing the data I am using a combination of predetermined and emerging categories. So far, the most interesting results have to do with conflicting views on literature in teacher education compared to the national syllabus for school, but also the different reading practices and ways of using literature in teacher education.

Keywords: teacher education, ethnography, teaching literature, literature reading, reading practices


Anders Westerlund (Finland)
ESSAYISTIC ELEMENTS IN THE WRITING IN UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL

Paper session Tuesday, 15:50-17:10 Room O95 Discussants: Piekut (Denmark); Krogh (Denmark)
The main purpose of my thesis is to examine different aspects of essay writing in upper secondary school in Finland, by combining theoretical perspectives from comparative literature and writing pedagogy. In the writing culture of the school in general, the essay is a very heterogeneous genre. The aspects I am examining are not the essay as an artistically elaborated form, but the combination of reflection and writing as represented by the tradition from Montaigne.

According to Good (1988) the essay preserves "the process of thinking", thus dealing with the individual’s self-experience. Atkins (2005) similarly sees the essay as "reflection upon experience". In writing pedagogy this perspective primarily corresponds to a cognitive approach. The six discourses of writing that Ivanič (2004) describes are also a helpful instrument in the analysis of the functions of the essay.

The empirical data consists of different kinds of student texts (essays in a broad sense) and textbooks.

The thesis will consist of four articles and a comprehensive summary. The first article will be an analysis of the notion of essay in textbooks; is the essay presented as an object belonging to the history of literature or as a genre with relevance for the students’ own writing? The second examines how students use essayistic elements in describing a picture. A third article analyses how students in the central national Matriculation Examination in history use essayistic strategies when facts first of all should be emphasized. The last article studies how students use the potential of reflection and ambiguity, two central aspects of the essay according to Adorno (1991).

Keywords: writing pedagogy, qualitative text analysis, essay, textbook

References:
Adorno, Theodor W. (1991) Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press.
Atkins, G. Douglas (2005), Tracing the Essay. Through Experience to Truth. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Good, Graham (1988), The Observing Self. Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge.
Ivanič, Roz (2004), Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and education Vol 18:3 s. 220–245