Talking about Texts : from Carpentry Technology and Welding Theory to Ancient Myths : Text-talks as a potential zone of proximal development for reading in upper secondary vocational education

This doctoral dissertation reports on results from case studies of how text-talks in a Swedish upper secondary school vocational programme, function as a zone of proximal development for reading. The aim was to investigate how text-talks function as a basis for discussion about the text content and thereby have a potential for developing understanding for the subject-specific text content in the subjects of Carpentry Technology, Welding Technology and Swedish in one class in the first year of the Industrial Technology Programme. The study is qualitative with an explorative approach (Burns 2011). Ordinary teaching and learning contexts were observed. The theorectical frame work is based on sociocultural (Säljö 2000) and sociosemiotic perspectives (Halliday 1978), a hermeneutical frame consisting mainly of the concepts of the zone of proximal development (Vygotskij 1934/2001), scaffolding (Wood, Bruner & Ross 1976), dialogicity (Bachtin 1986), and pedagogical codes (Bernstein 2000), as well as an analytical frame deriving from systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) and reception theory (Langer 1995, 2011a, 2011b). Three research questions were posed: How do the teachers organise and conduct the text-talks? What linguistic connections with the text are constructed when text content is introduced and developed in the text-talk? In what ways does movement in the text manifest in the text-talk? Data were collected through class-room observations and interviews. Field notes and recordings were made of eight text-talks, and three teacher interviews. Analyses of intertextual cohesion (Eggins 2004), and activity sequences (Martin & Rose 2007) were conducted. Analyses of text-based, associative and interactive text-movability (Liberg et al. 2012b) show the collaborative meeting with the text as expressed in the text-talk. The results indicate that built-out cohesion and progressive text-movability can widen the discourse around the text and thereby scaffold reading development.Delfinansierat av Ovanåkers kommun.