Studiens syfte är att jämföra hur elevers narrativa texter i årskurs 6 skiljer sig åt beroende på om de skrivs med hjälp av analoga skrivverktyg eller digitala skrivverktyg med ordbehandlingsprogram. Studien omfattar åtta elevtexter som analyserats utifrån aspekterna stavning, särskrivning samt felanvändning av versaler och gemener. En teoretisk utgångspunkt som studien utgått från är det sociokulturella perspektivets tankesätt om medierande redskap, där dessa redskap i vår studie är penna och tangentbord. Den andra teoretiska utgångspunkten är kognitivismen med fokus på kognitiva och sensomotoriska processers betydelse för elevers textskrivande. Resultatet visade att eleverna hade betydligt fler fel i sina analoga texter jämfört med de digitala gällande stavfel och felanvändning av versaler och gemener men däremot utmärkte sig resultatet för särskrivning eftersom inga skillnader blev framträdande oavsett vilket skrivverktyg som användes. Som förväntat presterade eleverna bättre i sina digitala texter där mycket går att koppla till det ordbehandlingsprogram som eleverna fick hjälp av. En annan viktig iakttagelse är att de analoga texterna innehöll oroväckande mycket fel vilket kan innebära att analoga texter skrivs allt mer sällan och att elever därför går miste om viktiga förmågor kopplat till de kognitiva och sensomotoriska processerna. Med andra ord visar resultatet att valet av medierande redskap har betydelse för elevernas skrivande.

In this essay, I endeavour to broaden the concept of literature by introducing five children’s literary works. Primarily, literary scholars have concentrated their studies on literature written by adults, regarding children as readers rather than writers. I believe that such a concept fails to cover the diversity of the literary field and therefore needs to change. Approaching writing and reading from a sociocultural point of view, and reading children’s stories from a narratological perspective, I intend to show that a new concept of literature is not only possible but inevitable. Due to the dialectic relationship between sender and receiver, literary and linguistic conventions and deviations, the definition of literature is renegotiated continuously. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the impact of the academy by illustrating that scholars are maintaining literary norms when putting titles on reading lists and acknowledging certain authorships. Writing this essay is thus a pledge of change. Adult research of children’s literary work encompasses a wide range of implicit age-related power issues (aetonormativity), according to the Swedish literary scholar, Maria Nikolajeva. In this essay, I show an insufficiency of some of these adult literary concepts when applied to children’s writing. I conclude that a partly new terminology, based on children’s writing, needs to co-exist with the older set of concepts. I also emphasize the need for further literary studies on children’s writing to question, criticize and complete mine, and to acknowledge the variety of literary aspects in children’s writing.

Libraries exist around us and for most of us they are a part of our every day life. But how often do we stop and think about their meaning? Libraries in fiction are usually not the center of the narrative, they play a role quietly in the background and offer a backcloth to the story. Yet they are a vital part of the story. Without them a big part of the magic in the stories would be lost. And what is their role in our lives? What do the libraries mean to the books they harbor, the readers who seek them out and society in which they have their axiomatic role? This essay’s focus is my story “Between the shelves”, which is about the young girl Julia and the mysterious passageway she discovers in her local library. Here she finds shelf after shelf with strange-looking books. They all seem to have peculiar titles, one of them is When Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo. Driven by her curiosity she starts reading the book, and soon finds herself inside it, living the battle. The library is not just a building, it is also a hub where different alternative realities can be reached through the books. In this essay I will compare the topics of my story, such as the interpretation of the library (both as a physical and mental place), the sense of mystery, interpretation of the librarians etc. to other fiction. I will compare these topics both with books for adults and for children to see if the interpretation differs.

When the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wrote Waiting for Godot in 1948-1949 he was in a state of artistic depression and confusion. He had already turned to French instead of English and with a manuscript for the stage he made an effort to get away from what he called ”the awful prose” he was working on at that time. Waiting for Godot had its first opening night in Paris in 1953, and during the years since then many different interpretations have been made of this challenging work of art. In this essay, with the meta textual elements in Waiting for Godot as a foundation, I’m reading the drama as a writer’s struggle with his material – not strictly biographical, but with Beckett as an artistic example. Vladimir and Estragon, as well as Pozzo and Lucky, then become personalizations of the voices in the mind of the author, where intellect/reason/analysis on one hand and intuition/feeling/fantasy on the other are working side by side, or as a pair of opposites, to try to get along through conflict and cooperation; conferring, clashing, and complementing one another. Godot will then function as the mystical and driving force, the necessary lack of purpose or fundamental meaning that keeps the artist in touch with art. In this aspect Godot has not to come; his absence is an absolute condition to get the play going, to keep the writer writing, to make all artists continue their lonely, tiresome, difficult work. Waiting for Godot tells us something about the struggle every writer has to face when writing a play, or a novel, or a poem, where he, or she, has to speak with and listen to the inner voices of intuition and intellect and try to get by in spite of the overall sense of hopelessness of it all. Art is at the same time without meaning and of infinite value and I believe that this paradox is alive and working in Waiting for Godot.

This thesis deals with the assessment of school texts by students in Swedish upper-secondary school or in the corresponding adult education and concentrates on what differs between the grades Pass and Fail. The 60 texts used in the survey come from the 1997 archives of the national test construction group. A questionnaire to teachers asks what criteria are most important when distinguishing between Pass and Fail. The five criteria pointed out are Holistic scoring, Relevant content, The connecting thought, Sentence structure and How the student has followed the instructions. The most salient result regarding grades is the difference between grades from the students’ own teachers and from the independent assessors. Ten texts have received a Fail from the student’s own teacher, but as many as 35 get an average Fail from three assessors. There is variation in assessment, but 18 Fail texts and 18 Pass texts get a unanimous grade. Quantitative analyses of the 60 texts show a definite correlation between grade and number of words. However, the Fail-groups among narrative, expository and argumentative texts contain both the shortest and the longest texts. School texts are longer now than thirty years ago, especially texts with low grades. Sentences and words have become shorter. Coherence is investigated by a method of reference cohesion. No clear difference between Pass and Fail texts can be found, but between types of essay topics. Also important is the organization of the text and its paragraphs, a factor which separates Fail and Pass texts. Various aspects of sentence structure show better results in the Pass texts. The thesis is concluded with a commentary on the demands of the last compulsory course in Swedish. The needed level is argued to be the ability to write for an unknown reader.

The overarching aim of the present thesis is to gain knowledge about how Rwandan university students understand and practice group-based learning. Specifically, this research takes a social constructivist perspective when examining how second year students within the area of Modern Languages reflect on collaborative writing and peer assessment as means to promote academic writing and active learning. Four studies make up this research. Thus, Study I examines how students carry out self-directed group work in writing. Study II investigates how instructor-guided writing groups can help promote students’ collaborative learning. Study III explores in what ways process writing as instruction method can help develop students’ academic writing abilities and Study IV focuses on how students experience peer assessment and peer feedback on group writing. The data, which are qualitative, were collected by means of interviews carried out with groups of students. The findings show that students perceive and conduct group-based learning in different ways, which can impact the quality of their learning. Also, based on initial support and guidance from the course instructor, most students acknowledged having been able to take stock of their common writing abilities and understand in what ways peer assessment and peer feedback can help them improve, and thus enrich their learning. A few students considered the common writing process time consuming though. In conclusion, some strategies are suggested to further improve group-based learning. / Det övergripande syftet med denna avhandling är att söka kunskap om hur universitetsstudenter i Rwanda förstår och praktiserar gruppbaserat lärande. Teoretiskt utgår den från ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv med särskilt fokus riktat mot hur studenter inom ämnesområdet moderna språk reflekterar över kollaborativt skrivande och inbördes bedömning som ett sätt att främja akademiskt skrivande och aktivt lärande. Avhandlingen består av fyra studier. I studie I undersöks studenters reflektioner över hur deras självstyrda skrivande i grupp genomförs. Studie II belyser lärarens roll i lärarlett skrivande i grupp och hur det kan påverka studenters kollaborativa lärande. I studie III studeras på vilket sätt metoder som synliggör skrivprocessen kan stödja studenters utveckling inom akademiskt skrivande. Studie IV fokuserar hur studenter erfar inbördes bedömning av skrivande i grupp. Data består av kvalitativa intervjuer genomförda med grupper av studenter under deras andra högskoleår Resultaten visar att studenterna uppfattar och genomför gruppbaserat lärande på olika sätt vilket kan påverka kvaliteten på deras lärande. Givet ett initialt stöd och vägledning från läraren som grund, bekräftade de flesta studenterna att de i grupparbetet kunde utnyttja sin gemensamma skrivförmåga och förstå på vilket sätt inbördes utvärdering kan hjälpa dem att förbättra sitt skrivande och därmed berika deras lärande. Vissa ansåg dock att den gemensamma skrivprocessen var tidsödande. Avslutningsvis föreslås strategier som kan användas för att ytterligare förbättra ett gruppbaserat lärande.

The main purpose of this thesis is to discuss what exile writing is and who can be seen as an exile writer. If the word “exile” is related to forced dislocation, like Paul Tabori and Sopia A. McClennen describes it, who can be viewed as an exile writer? Is Anders Olsson’s definition of an exile writer acceptable or not? Could the The Escape, a future story about exiled Northern Europeans in Myanmar, be classified as exile literature? Another purpose with this text is to describe how a story about exile can be made realistic and tangible to a reader who has not experienced exile. How can the exile experience be shown in a text? The third major aim with this thesis is to discuss how an ethnographic study differs from a fictive novel about another culture. Is an academic text more close to reality than fiction and what is reality anyway? Is it possible to make a mix of an academic study and a fictive novel?

In this essay I analyze the way my collection of poetry relates to the concept cyclic. What is cyclic and what different interpretations are there concerning the concept? Which other related concepts are there regarding things that seem to reoccur regularly? How does the cyclical, the circular, relate to the linear in regard, for example, to the perception of time? Life often creates the sense that different phenomena and experiences repeat themselves. Different processes are conducted according to regular or irregular cyclical phases, situations seem familiar and events can be relived.          Starting from my writing project Sinnligt kviller, a collection of poems, I discuss these questions in themselves and the impact they have had on my collection. I describe the phenomenon cyclic as a result of the emotions and moods this term creates in a more or less decisive way.          The intention with this paper is to show how Sinnligt kviller offers different perspectives of and reflections upon the various feelings provoked by the cyclic in our lives, feelings that are given my own voice in the literary text under study.

This essay concerns on how my novel The Teacher was influenced by the Masters course I completed in Creative Writing at Linnaeus University (2012 – 2014). Basically, The Teacher is about a love affair between a teacher and a student. With an intertextual, comparative and structurally inspired method I examine the process of writing my text. I also examine how my work relates to the great changes of the Swedish school system in the early 1990:s: deregulation, decentralisation and management by objectives. These changes are satirised in the novel. The essay also deals the role of the city in its time, the school in its town, contemporary literary texts with corresponding thematic, the moral values in their time and overall existential questions about responsibility, guilt, acceptance, non-judgmental attitudes, forgiveness and being in the present moment. The examining part of the essay shows how these premises get a concrete expression in the main conflict, main theme, characterization, narrative and stylistic choices. The essay clarifies the satirical point of view that turns The Teacher into an ironical reflection on the Swedish school system after the so-called “kommunaliseringen” (communities taking over from the state). The essay also clarifies how grown ups abdicate from responsibility in the Swedish society and how people judge each other and cling to roles. For that reason The Teacher is relevant within its time but also and even more since it is about recurring existential questions about responsibility and non-judgmental attitudes.

The aim of this study is to investigate how five boys in grade 3 of compulsory school structure and use language when they write narrative texts retelling and assessing personally experienced events. This is studied by interpreting how the boys use genre steps that are typical of the structure of personal narrative texts and by detecting and naming different linguistic features in the texts. The material in the study consists of five boys’personal reports and the method, which is based on the theories of genre pedagogy (see Johansson & Sandell Ring 2012:28ff, 223f), comes from systemic functional linguistics. A central finding of the study is that the boys structure their texts in varying combinations of genre steps which commonly occur in texts of a narrative kind. Another central finding is that the language in the boys’ texts consists of many verbs and verb groups which explain that someone is acting or doing something, different discourse connectives to indicate time, along with expressions for emotions and descriptions of experiences or objects.