Att hjälpa eller stjälpa? Om lärarinteraktion och lärarstöd för skrivande i skolan

To assume that a classroom is a place for interaction and a multivoiced arena is neither new nor controversial. Today it is common that students are given more space on the conversational floor,in the name of democracy and dialogue-based pedagogy. However this does not mean that the teacher can abdicate from her or his responsibilities. On the contrary, a dialogical classroom requires highly skilled teachers who know how to lead the classroom interaction and classroom activities toward the necessary goals in a constructive way. This article shows how important it is for a (high school) teacher to make conscious verbal choices in the interaction with students in order to give them the best and most solid support during a writing project. The framework in this article is interactional analysis (activity analysis, CA, text analysis) from a sociocultural perspective. The analysis is carried out as a close study of the interaction during a video-recorded writing project in a Swedish classroom