Between Dante and 'Big Brother' : Textual worlds of Swedish upper secondary school students

This dissertation deals with Swedish upper secondary school students’ encounter and reception of various fictional texts in and outside of school. The focus of the study is how literary instruction, based on an expanded text concept, succeeds in meeting the students’ expectations and previous experiences of fictional texts. The theoretical framework consists of theories that approach reading as a transaction between text and reader in a social and cultural context. The study is founded on qualitative methods, and the empirical material was collected through participant observation and interviews with students and teachers in four upper secondary school classes between 2001 and 2003. The research questions are: How does literary instruction develop students’ knowledge of fictional texts and reading? In what ways are the students’ textual worlds in and outside of school dialogically interrelated? How do students use different fictional texts in building their identities? Which values regarding different texts are visible in the classroom? Findings indicate that mismatches between teachers’ and students’ literary repertoires are common in upper secondary school literary teaching. Since the literary instruction mainly drew upon traditional fiction, the students’ construction of literary worlds was not sufficiently supported. The students’ expectations of fiction reading were characterized by strong emotional involvement, and this was particularly true for the male students. The female students reported that there was a lack of female perspectives in the literary teaching. The pedagogical implications of the study concern the importance of identifying the students’ literary repertoires and matching those with the literary instruction. Literary pedagogy should aim to expand these repertoires, and to help students acquire new reader roles. One way of achieving this is to promote dialogical teaching that encourages both efferent and aesthetic reading. Findings of the present study also indicate that teachers’ resources for working with an expanded text concept are limited. Consequently, current teacher education programmes and further training of working teachers must deal with reading of fictional texts from new and broader perspectives