Literary education – a transition between everyday language and academic literacy
Submitted by:
Aslaug Fodstad Gourvennec
Abstract:
In 2006 a new curriculum was implemented in Norwegian school. The curriculum has been characterized as a “literacy reform†(Berg 2005). The ideals of the reform represent an awareness of academic language in general – both spoken and written – and a corresponding awareness of domain specific discourses. This way of reasoning suggests a developmental line from elementary school to higher education, and emphasises the gap between the general and the highly specialised forms of knowledge. Development in this sense is a matter of gaining familiarity with different ways with words.
In this study, we address ways with words in literature education. The study takes as starting point the significance of a more capable peer as a model, and explores the domain specific practices amongst teachers and high-achieving students in last year of upper secondary school (17-18 years old). The material of the study consists of recordings of literary group discussions, oral summaries of these conversations, as well as individually written interpretative summaries, logged with a key-logging tool. In the paper, we will present and discuss the overall design of the study and some results based on early stage data collection among teachers, considered as experts in the domain. We will focus particularly on distribution of and transitions between everyday and academic discourse in the group discussions and in the individual written texts. Examining the characteristics of discourse at a high-achieving level may bring on models of domain specific practices with consequences for literature education in upper secondary school.
Presented by:
Aslaug Fodstad Gourvennec, University of Stavanger, National Centre for Reading Education and Research, 4036 Stavanger, NORWAY
Atle Skaftun, University of Stavanger, National Centre for Reading Education and Research, 4036 Stavanger, NORWAY
Per Henning Uppstad, University of Stavanger, National Centre for Reading Education and Research, 4036 Stavanger, NORWAY