What does it mean to write a good or bad text and how can we tell the difference?

In the past couple of decades there has been an increased interest in how content is construed, communicated, evaluated and renovated within different disciplines such as science, history or literature (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012:8). Research has shown that students need to be explicitly taught these specialized ways to read, write and reason within the context of a certain discipline in order to grasp the differences (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2014:637). However, there are few studies focusing on how such understandings and reasonings are visibly emerging in early school writing and even fewer on what specifically characterizes reasoning in-between subject area writing in early school years. The purpose of the presented paper is therefore to propose a text analytical methodinforming an in-depth understanding of subject specific reasoning in early school writing. To this end, the paper provides a suggestion based on text analytical tools inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2014) of how to examine how children make use of linguistic resources to reason in early literary texts. The results show that reasoning in literary texts in primary school can mean both to explore a diverse world in text, as well as more uniform ones, while reasoning within scientific texts displays more homogenous linguistic resources. The paper thus makes evident that there’s a diversity of linguistic resources in use, pointing to the potentiality for development of broader literary repertoires of children in early school years. Finally, the results point to the need for research regarding the nascency of other subject specific reasoning, as well as how, and what aspects of text written in early school years are valued by assessing teachers. Halliday, Michael A. K. & Christian M. I. M Matthiessen 2014. An introduction to functional grammar. 4. ed. London: Arnold. Shanahan, Timothy. & Cynthia Shanahan 2012. What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders32(1), s. 7–18. Shanahan, Cynthia & Shanahan Timothy. 2014. Does Disciplinary Literacy have a place in Elementary school? The Reading Teacher, 67:8, 636-639