Skrivundervisning i grundskolans årskurs 3

Abstract in English

This dissertation constitutes an illustration of how writing instruction in elementary school, year three, is conducted. At this stage of schooling, most pupils are assumed to have acquired basic reading and writing skills, and from now on, and increasingly over the years that follow, they are expected to read and write longer texts within different genres and subjects. The aim of this thesis is to study writing lessons that were conducted under the framework of four writing projects in a classroom, and the student-written texts that that resulted thereof. The writing pro-jects are characterised by focus on similar text types, which in my mate-rial includes ”the fairy tale”, ”a letter to the editor”, ”instructions” and a ”factual text”. The focus of the study is on the relationship between the learning support offered to the pupils in the classroom and the na-ture of texts that the pupils then write.

The research is inspired by ethnographic methodology, and is based on material consisting of field notes, video recordings and student texts. The theoretical framework assumes a socio-cultural view of learning and a dialogical view of text and writing. The teaching practices are studied on the basis of how they are built up by different chains of activities (reading, conversation and writing). Particular attention is paid to which text dimensions are addressed in classroom conversations: content, form or function. The pupils’ texts are analysed on the basis of their macro structure, and the analysis builds on the concept of ”text activity”.

On an overall level, the results point to writing being a social activity, which is also closely interconnected to reading, and above all dialogue and conversation. The writing instruction offered to the students is also characterized by a broad view of what literacy is about. The study points out the value of versatile learning support, where the function, form and content of texts, in relation to the learning goals, are made explicit in the teaching. An important result is that the functional dimension of writing, in particular, favours writing development. On a more general level, the study raises the question of which literacy skills can and should be pro-moted by writing education in the early primary school years.