Får man synas i texten? En fallstudie om hur gymnasieelever skapar mening om vetenskaplig text

The purpose of the study is to improve knowledge on teaching about academic text practice in the school subject of Swedish in upper secondary school. The study focuses on the conditions offered to students to approach this text practice and on students’ meaning-making about academic writing and academic text. The investigation has been conducted in the form of a case study in an upper secondary school class during the one year course ‘Swedish 3’. Ethnographic methods were used for data collection and the empirical material consists of classroom observations of text talk, interviews and focus group discussions with students and texts used in class. Theoretically, the study is based on socio-cultural and dialogic perspectives on language, learning and meaning-making (Wertsch 1998, Linell 2009). Students’ learning is seen as a process of appropriation and the texts used in teaching and text talk are seen as mediating resources that enable the students to make sense of academic text as a genre. The concepts ‘recontextualization’, ‘positioning’ and ‘boundary object’ are used in the analysis of the students’ meaning-making. The results show that the students’ meaning-making is characterized by ideas about objectivity and that the report genre is regarded as a norm för academic text. The results also show a complexity in the students’ appropriation process. The students use different recontextualizations of the objectivity concept in a relatively restricted way. In combination with dichotomies used in their meaning-making this prevents an inclusive understanding of genre offered in the teaching context from being fully realized. In addition, the results show challenges in the form of uncertainty regarding their own voice and the role of argumentation in texts of an academic character. However, there are also indications that students at the end of the course had a more nuanced understanding of genre, which involved regarding academic text in a wider perspective and aproaching the “rules” for academic writing more freely. Other results indicate that the texts used in the teaching have a potential to act as boundary objects (Star 2010) and facilitate the students’ crossing of borders between different understandings of genre as well as between text practices in school and higher education. One conclusion is that the purposes and functions of academic texts, as well as the processes behind their production, needs to be more explicit in order to facilitate the students’ appropriation process