Come with me into the text : pupils' encounters in text through peer respons

The aim of this study is to investigate the meaning-making expressed by pupils in upper primary school when they work with peer response while writing an explanatory and comparative text. The questions answered through the study concern, firstly, what pupils aim their written response at when they read texts, and secondly, what experiences the pupils highlight in the work of giving and receiving peer response. The theoretical foundation on which the study rests is dialogism (Bakhtin 1952–1953/1997). The pupils’ response work is considered in terms of the significance of dialogue for learning, in which language functions as a mediating tool (Säljö 2000). In the texts analysed in the study, there is an interaction between writer and reader, and there is a dialogue that can be related to earlier texts and the conventions developed there (Ajagán-Lester, Ledin et al. 2003, Evensen 1999). The empirical material for the study comes from a class with 23 pupils in grade 5. The material consists of pupils’ written response to classmates’ texts, pupils’ written reflections and six interviews with pupils about working with peer response. The result shows that the pupils are aware that they are writing for readers and that they must therefore think about how the reader is supposed to understand the text. The response is geared above all to the purpose and readers of the text and to how the content is organized. In cases where spelling and punctuation become an obstacle to an understanding of the text, there is also response about that. Pupils appear to be able to utilize their knowledge of text to give a response to classmates’ texts and to their own texts. The pupils also say that they will retain what they have learned in this writing project in future situations when they have to write texts. The double dialogue stands out as central. Interaction is important and the conventions are used to achieve what the pupils’ appear to have in focus: the reader’s understanding of the text. Through contexts where pupils meet in dialogue about text, meaning is created. In this study pupils in upper primary school state that response work and the resulting transactions lead to a knowledge of how to write texts, and through this meaning is created