Strategiska skribenter. Skrivprocesser i fysik och svenska

The purpose of this study is to explore how experienced student writers in Swedish schools handle two different writing tasks, a lab report in physics and a text to be written within Swedish as a school subject. Applying a dialogical perspective on writing, the study is an attempt to explore what role subject contexts play for the students’ writing processes and to what extent the strategies used by the students are more individual. The writing tasks were solved outside of class, a frequent, but relatively unexplored way of organizing writing tasks in upper secondary school in Sweden.

The results of the study indicate that different subject contexts enforce the emergence of different writing processes. The lab report was written in a certain order, from easy to difficult parts. Each part of the text was written on its own. Editing affecting the macrostructure of the text did not occur. In contrast, when writing the text within Swedish as a school subject, the paragraphs were developed at several different times during the writing process and questions concerning the global structure of the text seem constantly to have presented themselves. Extensive deletions were performed, and new angles to the subject introduced, affecting the macrostructure of the text.

Writing processes are also individual. In a close-up study, three students – here called Kerstin, Paula and Sara – video filmed their work with the two texts. The texts were logged by the students, writing on Google Drive. In this material the individual strategies come out in basically two ways: in the resources chosen by the students as well as in their editing of their texts. Kerstin may be said to have used ”herself” or, rather, a general writing ability. For Paula, her father functioned as an important resource. Sara was the one of the three who used digital media most frequently. In the students’ editing patterns, above all, Kerstin and Sara differed significantly. Kerstin did her editing during the formulation stage, regardless of writing task, while Sara mainly did her editing after the formulation stage.