Qualities in students’ texts. : Writing with different tools in year 2

Abstract The aim of the study was to investigate the quality of pupils’ narrative texts written either by hand or on a tablet. The questions concern which structures are characteristic of the texts as a whole and what is distinctive about hand-written texts and those written on a tablet. To investigate this, 46 pupil texts from grade 2 were analysed. Each pupil in the class wrote two texts, one with each writing tool. The overall theoretical approach in the study is dialogism, which views all utterances as being related to each other. In this study that means that the pupils received teaching about how to write a story, and then wrote stories of their own. Relief theory, which has its foundation in dialogism, was used as analytical framework. With this model, analyses are made of the text as a whole. The overall structure and focus of the text are regarded as the foreground and the additions and expanded details supporting these are viewed as the background text. This interaction between foreground and background gives the relief perspective. Proceeding from relief theory, the structures of the texts in their entirety were analysed. At the intermediate and local level of the texts, dialogues and connectives were analysed, along with the number of unique words and the total number of words. The relief of the texts was analysed in terms of quality at global, intermediate and local text level. The relief analysis revealed that three different categories of relief could be identified in these texts. The result shows that the difference in quality concerns how the backgrounds are expanded. The results of the study show that there are differences between the pupils’ handwritten texts and texts written on a tablet, but the differences are small. The biggest differences concern the number of unique words and the total number of words. The texts written on a tablet contain both more unique words and more words in total than texts written by hand. Keywords relief theory, tablet, writing tools, early school years, student text, narrative tex