Jakten på den godkända texten : Läspraktiker och internetanvändning på gymnasieskolan

This thesis presents a case study from an authentic school practice, where seven students, in their second year of a social sciences program in an upper sec­on­dary school, use internet texts in various learning situations. The aim of the study is to map the reading practices of students encountering internet texts. The main data con­sists of obser­vations, audio and screen recordings, writ­ten instruc­tions, and screen ­shots of the sites visited. Reading practices are ana­lysed, draw­ing on concepts from New Literacy Studies and Systemic Func­tional Grammar, inclu­ding literacy events, literacy in terms of text cul­ture, text­ual norms, abstraction, auth­o­rity and mod­ality as a scale of reliability. The results reveal that meaning making resources such as colours, amount of writing and images and choice of fonts all seem to be parts of students’ con­ceptions of reliability. These textual norms result in learning situations in which students search for texts with pre­dominantly dense writing promoting ency­clopaedic know­ledge. These highly auth­orit­ative texts can be hard to under­stand for the students, something that the text analyses indicate. In com­parison to text books, the internet texts used show, a higher level of auth­ority and abs­trac­tion, rein­forced by gram­matical meta­phors. Most situ­ations in the study include peer interaction, but the most obvious learning poten­­tial resides in situations with a clear reading goal, where stu­dents work in groups and where negotiation is part of the meaning mak­ing pro­cess. The pedagogical implications of the study suggest the potential for students to achieve a higher degree of understanding of the encountered inter­net texts, through group work, and discussions concerning the impact of different layouts and the demands of verbal language. Another potential con­cerns methods for avoiding critical literacy being reduced to trivial visual scanning, via dis­cussions focusing on criteria for reliability evaluations. It is suggested that increased teacher awareness concerning the types of internet texts the students will encounter in authentic situations may contribute to students’ field and genre insight