"It's so depressing if you think that Swedish means spelling". : Three teachers comment on a pupil's text

The aim of the study is to investigate which linguistic aspects teachers pay attention to when they analyze a pupil’s text, and what response they choose to give based on the analysis. The study builds on semi-structured interviews with three teachers and applies a sociocultural perspective. The result shows that the teachers in the study largely proceed from a functional outlook on texts. Although they were given a text with many linguistic problems on the surface, they saw the aspects on a more general textual level, for example, the main theme and the way the text was adjusted to suit the receiver. In the analyses of the pupil’s text the informants revealed different evaluations of the level of linguistic development a pupil should have reached in grade six, and different interpretations of how a pupil should write to satisfy the demands in the syllabus for Swedish. When the informants were asked to select aspects that they would use in response to an envisaged pupil, it turned out that their comments did not have the same spread between the different levels of the text. In their responses the informants were generally more inclined to proceed from the general levels of the text than they were in their earlier analyses