L1 Writing Performance in Swedish Upper Secondary School: Explanatory Variables with a focus on media affordances
Submitted by:
Hampus Holm
Abstract:
For the last twenty years, media habits have changed dramatically and with them the ways that we produce and receive text. In addition to printed orthographic text, new multimodal and digital text, where interaction and modal transfer is central has often become included in text definitions.
Bringing an experience of great text variety, both in production and reception, young people of today face a school system where the ability to write well and in specific ways is important. A symbol for the genre- and style normative writing canon of schools is the national test system and its effect on teaching and on grading. Many recent studies have been investigating how new media habits affect learning processes and writing development (e.g. Erixon et.al. 2012, Kress & Selander 2012, Svensson 2014).
This study explores which factors, media and other, that may influence results on national tests in L1 writing in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. In order to do so results from national tests were acquired from schools and students (16-17 years old) were asked to fill in a digital questionnaire. The questionnaire included background (gender, parents education) questions about their media habits, language and writing experiences, and writing self-efficacy.
The specific media the students mentioned (software, games, book titles, film titles) were analysed in relation to their affordances for writing (e.g. what genre they represent, if they include watching/reading/writing/speaking) and these new codes were used as variables in the analysis. The other variables include previous grades in language subjects, gender, parents´ highest educational level, writing self-efficacy, and media use frequency.
Preliminary results indicate that reading books frequently is positively correlated with high marks and a high frequency of playing console games correlates with low marks. The media used by the participants are in both English and Swedish, predominantly multimodal and offer written texts that are close to spoken language. The relationship between media affordances, other factors and writing performance will be presented and discussed from a pedagogical perspective.
References
Erixon, P., Marner, A., Scheid, M., Strandberg, T., Örtegren, H. (2012). School Subject Paradigms and Teaching Practice in the Screen Culture: Art, Music and Mother Tongue (Swedish) under Pressure.
European Educational Research Journal (online), 11 (2), 255-273.
Kress, G. , Selander, S. (2012). Multimodal Design, Learning and Cultures of Recognition. Internet and Higher Education, 15 (4), 265-268.
Svensson, A. (2014). The media habits of young people in Sweden: The use of fictional texts in school and recreational contexts. Education Inquiry,
3 (5), 337-357 .
Keywords: L1 writing, Upper Secondary School, media habits