Eleven och Lärandemiljön : En studie av barns lärande med fokus på läsning och skrivning

The thesis describes what happens when twelve students learn to read and write. The main purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the learning process of the students, with respect to reading and writing, based on the specific learning environment. Special attention is given to the relationship between the individual and the environment. It is the author's strong belief that one needs to look at both these aspects together. Further, the intention of the thesis is not to compare different environments in terms of good or bad, but rather to use them as examples of situated social practices for reading. The investigation has an ethnographic approach and is based primarily on qualitative data collected by personal studies of the students' reading and writing processes in the classroom environment. Secondly, estimations of the students' reading abilities have been performed in order to validate various kinds of data. Twelve students have been studied from August 1998 when they started in first grade and until March 2001. The analysis derives from Vygotskij's theory, the sociocultural perspective, and to get a better understanding of differences and similarities between the environments, Bernstein's theory about the visible and invisible pedagogic was used. The result indicates that in a classroom, students show a variety of specific behaviours related to the setting in different ways. The conclusion of this thesis is that it is urgent to make teachers observe and pay attention to the behaviour pattern of each group of readers. Teachers hereby receive a tool that gives them a chance to identify students with negative patterns in purpose to make them choose a constructive way of learning. Through guidance the teacher may transfer successful strategies and/or design situations that make it possible for the students to discover an alternative way of learning