The aim of this study is to explore teachers’ experience of teaching reading comprehension at upper secondary special school national programs. To find out the answers to the purpose and research issues a written interview via the Internet where fourteen teachers answered   a questionnaire with open questions. I have analyzed the responses using the concepts scaffolding and artefacts taken from the sociocultural perspective. The summarized result show that teachers work with teaching strategies for pupils to assimilate text with understanding. The teachers have a central role in this form of co- learning and acts as a support in the students reading comprehension learning. Teachers are also working to support students learning by making adjustments such as easy- to-read texts and support of speech and images. In the teaching teachers use artefacts as well as they scaffold the pupils in the learning of reading comprehension. / Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur några lärare på gymnasiesärskolans nationella program beskriver sina erfarenheter av att arbeta med att stödja elevers läsförståelse. För att få svar på syftet och forskningsfrågorna genomfördes en skriftlig intervju via internet där fjorton lärare svarade på intervjufrågor med öppna frågor. Svaren analyseras genom att använda begreppen scaffolding och artefakter som är hämtade från det sociokulturella perspektivet. Det sammanfattande resultatet visar att lärare arbetar med att undervisa i läsförståelsestrategier för att elever skall ta till sig text med förståelse. Lärarna i studien har en central roll i detta samspel och de fungerar som stöd i elevernas läsförståelseundervisning. Lärarna arbetar även med att stötta elevers läsning genom att göra anpassningar genom att använda anpassade och lättlästa texter samt stöd av talsyntes och bilder. Lärarna använder artefakter såväl som att de stöttar elevernas lärande genom scaffolding i elevernas läsförståelseundervisning.

Social media has increased significantly in recent years and become a part of many people's lives. As social media progresses, questions about its impact on people's well being are highlighted. The aim of this study was to examine how young girls reflect on social media's impact on their self-esteem and well-being. Two focus group interviews were conducted. A qualitative content analysis was created from the collected material, where we with the help of social constructivism and symbolic interactionism analyzed the collected empirical data. The results showed that the interviewees regarded social media as having an impact on high school girls' self-esteem and well-being. This was shown in particular by the importance of "likes". In the discussion section we discuss the results that are connected to the previous research. / Sociala medier har ökat kraftigt de senaste åren och därmed blivit en del av många människors liv. I takt med sociala mediers framfart kan frågor om dess inflytande på människors välbefinnande lyftas. Syftet med denna studie är att, genom fokusgruppsintervjuer, undersöka hur unga tjejer upplever sociala mediers inverkan på deras självkänsla och välbefinnande. Av det insamlade materialet genomfördes en kvalitativ innehållsanalys där vi med hjälp av social konstruktivismen och symbolisk interaktionism analyserat den insamlade empirin. Resultatet visade tydliga tecken på att sociala medier har en påverkan på gymnasieflickors självkänsla och välbefinnande. Detta visade sig bland annat genom betydelsen av ”likes”. I diskussionen diskuteras resultatet som kopplas samman med den tidigare forskningen.

Second language acquisition is a field that has fascinated linguists for numerous years and is a topic that is very much connected to how English teachers in Sweden try to teach the English language to the students in their classrooms. In 2009 Sundqvist examined what possible effects extramural English could have on learners' oral proficiency and their vocabulary. In her study she found out that extramural English “is an independent variable and a possible path to progress in English” (Sundqvist, 2009, p. i).  In 2014, three Swedish secondary- and upper secondary school teachers started a project for the Erasmus+. These three teachers tried to create better teaching conditions and to come up with new methods for teaching English. During their investigation they noticed that students who had only been in Sweden for four years or less, seemed to get less exposed to English in their spare time than native Swedish students, which created a disadvantage for them. Since the time when these two studies were carried out, the number of immigrants has increased drastically, which creates the need for further investigation within this area of second language acquisition. In this study, I therefore investigate how much and in what way students come in contact with the English language outside of school. I also examine if there are any differences between native Swedish students versus non-native Swedish students and if so, how this might affect the students and their grades in English. The study was conducted through the use of questionnaires and through observations of different teaching situations, including the participating teachers' methods and the participating students' reactions. The results show that there are differences between native- and non-native students when it comes to extramural English activities. The results also show that these differences seem to affect the students' grades in English, in favour of the native Swedish students. The native students tend to spend more time on extramural English activities, especially in connection to the Internet and computer games, than the non-native students. These results indicate that something needs to be done in order to compensate for the non-native students' disadvantage.

This study explored the view of a small-scale group of upper secondary school seniors on school-related stress during their last school year in comparison to previous years. A qualitative research method was used and five students partook in semi-structured interviews with open-end questions. The study derived from the perspectives of two theoretical models that were selected due to their relevance; firstly, the Demand-Control Support model, and secondly, the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping. The results show that these upper secondary school seniors describe themselves as less stress than they perceived themselves to be in their second year. Regarding the stress-related effects experienced by these students, it was found that sleep deprivation and anger were the most problematic ones along with their tendencies to compare themselves to others. It was also found that the five participants perceived the school health servieces' work as insufficient in many ways. One of the most recurring suggestions, by the students, on how to improve it was to discuss stress and the availability of the school health services more openly.

This thesis is about 16 newly arrived students from Iraq enrolled in the introductory programme for newcomers, in two Swedish upper secondary schools during the academic year 2010/11. The study focuses on the newly arrived students’ possession of cultural, social, educational and linguistic capital and their migration experience as well as their plans for future studies. The theoretical framework is based on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER). Of crucial importance is the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, who bridges Bourdieu and migration studies. Also, general sociological concepts like class, gender and ethnicity are used. Traditional ethnographic approaches such as observations, informal conversations and interviews are the main methods. The empirical results show that the newly arrived students have varying degrees of inherited assets, although the majority came from more affluent backgrounds. They also differed with regard to their school background. The ones who went to public schools in Iraq described the Iraqi educational system as authoritarian institution in which they had to conform to collective norms and values. Those who went to private international schools reported that their schools were similar to those in Sweden, but significantly more demanding. The youths also had assets that had little value in the Swedish educational system. One example is the ability to speak several languages like Arabic, Kurdish, Syriac and Chaldean. Newly arrived students usually have no experience of the Swedish school system and cannot speak Swedish. This limitation defines them as a disadvantaged group when they enter the Swedish educational system, in programmes specially designed for them. Furthermore, the newly arrived students are spatially and symbolically segregated from other students and are thus poorly integrated in into the schools’ ordinary activities. The newly arrived students quickly become aware of that they do not master the language and that they are not familiar with the study norms and roles in Sweden. However, the students express high educational aspirations and emphasize education as a key factor in achieving respectability. Or, in Bourdieu’s sense, success in the Swedish educational system represents symbolic capital, for the Swedish born population as well as for as members of their own ethnic group.

This is an empirical study that aims to contribute to knowledge about the opportunities the career counselling conversation offers young migrants in shaping their future. Conversations play a central role in career counselling activities in Swedish schools; furthermore, the question of how the Swedish society promotes the inclusion of its immigrants has become an increasingly urgent issue. The study draws on a dialogical framework on interaction and meaning making and seeks to gain insight into how meaning about the future is formed in career counselling conversations. The following questions were formulated: How is the interaction between migrant students and their counsellors formed in counselling conversations? How can the interaction be understood in relation to the participants and their contexts? What seems to enable or constrain students’ meaning making about the future in these conversations? The study was conducted in an introductory course for newly arrived immigrants at the upper secondary level. Researcher followed a series of two career counselling conversations between five students and five counsellors, respectively. The empirical material comprises three parts: audio-recordings of conversations, observations of these conversations and audio-recorded interviews with counsellors and students. The students, three men and two women, have a non-European background and had been in Sweden between one and three years. All except one can be considered a refugee. The material was transcribed, and the conversations were analysed with the concepts of communicative projects and strategies. The conversations are the primary empirical material. The results show that the counsellors’ and the students’ communicative projects primarily are complementary. Both the counsellor and the conversations appear as crucial for students learning about Swedish opportunity structures and meaning making about the future. The analysis also elucidated interactional patterns and interplay that seem to constrain the students’ possibilities to shape a future with their own conditions within the conversations. The conversations focused on Swedish career opportunities and lacked a transnational perspective. Furthermore, the students’ migrant background was not made relevant in the conversations; hence, the conversations risk contributing to students’ stigmatisation. The counsellors’ methods also seem at risk of individualising issues related to institutional preconditions and structural constraints. However, the analysis also displayed how the counsellor can counteract these constraining effects. The result implicates, in alignment with other studies, that the responsibility for the students’ career processes cannot be put on counselling conversations alone; more comprehensive and integrated activities for career learning in the schools are necessary to provide immigrant students with reasonable possibilities for shaping a future. Moreover, the conclusion is drawn that counsellor’s conversation skills are important for the students meaning making about the future but that counsellors also must have, among other things, the ability to comprehend migrants’ feelings and existential issues regarding the future and, not least, knowledge about the conditions of migrants and the ability to both comprehend and actively recognize injustices and different expressions of power. There are seldom others advocating for the rights of migrants. / Vägledning mellan erkännande, rättvisa och skillnadsskapande

This study is based on interviews and aims to shed some light upon the teaching of history in the swedish upper secondary school. Is it possible for the female pupils, to identify themself with the way it's presented? There's been different studies regarding how women are portrayed in the history books, are they there at all or are they forgotten? I interviewed eight female pupils to find out if they could indentify themself with the subject, and if not, what could we do as teacher to make it more relevant for them and easier to indentify themself with the subject? The results shows that most of them can't indentify themself with the subject, feeling that it's a mans world - nothing to do with them. At the same time they say that the subject can come in handy to know why certain things happend and to learn by our mistakes. In general the pupils told me that the subject was more interesting when the teacher shows and talks more about women. With that being said, they didn’t say that they wanted the different historical characters that are men gone, just that women should get the same attention. By knowing that the female pupils feels like this we could make the subject more relevant for them and easier to indentify themself with it.

The purpose of this study was to find out more about upper secondary school students ́ experience of peer response to media productions, eg movies and digital stories. We also explored how they learn peer response, how they use it and how peer response affects students’ choice of content for the media productions that they produce. The methods that we have used is an unstructured lesson observation, combined with discussions in two focus groups with 1st and 2nd grade students enroled at the Arts program at a secondary school in a metropolitan area in Sweden. The results of the study show that students experience peer response as positive but emphasises the importance of the teachers’ attitude and expertise as essential both to the students learning process as well as to their experience of giving and receiving feedback from a fellow student. The students find it difficult to be completely honest when they give response to a friend. The teachers’ response always outweighs the response from a fellow student and the students in this study do not use the peer response to revise and improve their media productions. The study shows that the students do not adapt the content of their media productions due to the fact that classmates will assess the result. They perceive media productions as something per definition accessible to the public, that is, the products will be showcased in public, for example, published on the internet. The students relate to this fact as they select content to their media productions. / Syftet med denna studie har varit att ta reda på mer om gymnasieelevers upplevelser av kamratrespons på medieproduktioner, t.ex. filmer och digitala berättelser. Vi har också undersökt hur de lär sig kamratrespons, hur de använder sig av den och på vilket sätt kamratrespons påverkar elevernas val av innehåll till de medieproduktioner som de producerar. Metoderna som vi har använt oss av är en ostrukturerad lektionsobservation i kombination med diskussioner i två olika fokusgrupper med elever från årskurs 1 och 2 på det Estetiska programmet på en gymnasieskola i ett storstadsområde. Resultatet av studien visar att eleverna upplever kamratrespons som någonting positivt men framhåller att lärarens attityd och expertis är avgörande för såväl övning som upplevelsen av att ge och ta emot respons från en kamrat. Eleverna upplever att det är svårt att vara helt ärlig när de ger respons till en kamrat. Lärarens respons väger alltid tyngre än kamraters och eleverna i studien använder sig heller inte av kamraternas respons för att omarbeta och förbättra sina medieproduktioner. Studien visar att eleverna inte anpassar innehållet till sina medieproduktioner utifrån vetskapen om att klasskamraterna kommer att ge respons. Eleverna uppfattar medieproduktioner som per definition publika, d.v.s. produkter som kommer att visas upp offentligt, exempelvis publiceras på internet och detta faktum förhåller sig eleverna till när de väljer innehåll till sina medieproduktioner.

The present study aims to examine how teachers write polemical articles. This genre often occurs in national standardized tests in Swedish schools. The study seeks to analyze argumentative structures in the articles. It also categorizes assessment notes written by the teachers in response to each others’ articles, by interpreting response texts.     The examination shows that there is uncertainty among the teachers about how to create structures in argumentative text types. As a result the persuasive function of the texts suffers.     The teachers tend to comment on macro level findings in texts. However they grade each other’s texts with high grades referring to micro level components such as spelling, sentence structure and neat wording.

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 &amp; Ross 1976), dialogicity (Bachtin 1986), and pedagogical codes (Bernstein 2000), as well as an analytical frame deriving from systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday &amp; 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 &amp; 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. / <p>Delfinansierat av Ovanåkers kommun.</p>