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"Why are you researching us?" ... "Are you a spy?"..."Are you taping right now?" asked children at the ‘Community School,' in those first moments of this qualitative study. This thesis contributes to the growing body of social research in the field of early childhood education, viewing children as capable and competent meaning makers, engaging their input as ‘agentive researchers,’ and reconceptualizing research methodology, play theory, and early childhood teaching practice. Changing contexts of 21st century childhoods, as well as new theories regarding literacy and meaning making, prompted this research involving a reconceptualization of play and its value, within the context of multiliteracies theories and holistic education. This process of reconceptualization was informed by observation (playscapes, places, props, plots, partners and practices) of boys at play considering their meaning-making processes. Through participant observation in a full-day Kindergarten, play episodes were documented (i.e., digital videography, photography, audio recording, field notes, collection of artifacts) and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Three broad themes emerged. First, physical and social aspects of the Classroom Play Environment were found to be influential in creating conditions for play, influencing the quality of engagement and learning. Ample time, space, freedom of movement, and access to plentiful creative materials were important in children’s active play and meaning making processes. Common behavourist classroom management techniques were avoided in favour of social constructivist approaches, which promoted children’s self-regulation with an aim to recognize and foster their sense of agency, and support emergent play-literacy practices (Hill & Nichols, 2006). Second, children’s explanations regarding the source and inspiration of play themes and interests prompted a reconsideration of ‘spontaneity’ as foundational to a Definition of Play. Defining play processes as “multiliteracies”, and play episodes as “text”, play ideas were found to be intertextually linked to multiple texts including picture books, multimedia, and iconic texts. Third, Boys' Play was observed to involve much movement combined with rough and tumble, pretend, construction, and word play, prompting a re-consideration of ‘narrative’ within the context of play and literacy research literature. As well, boys inquired about gendered play objects and identities in complex and personal ways. This digital thesis document utilized a multimodal design, embedding visual and audio text, creating a new multimodal thesis form with an aim toward considering all modes of meaning making as equal, rather than emphasizing or privileging print text (Jewitt & Kress, 2003).

"Why are you researching us?" ... "Are you a spy?"..."Are you taping right now?" asked children at the ‘Community School,' in those first moments of this qualitative study. This thesis contributes to the growing body of social research in the field of early childhood education, viewing children as capable and competent meaning makers, engaging their input as ‘agentive researchers,’ and reconceptualizing research methodology, play theory, and early childhood teaching practice. Changing contexts of 21st century childhoods, as well as new theories regarding literacy and meaning making, prompted this research involving a reconceptualization of play and its value, within the context of multiliteracies theories and holistic education. This process of reconceptualization was informed by observation (playscapes, places, props, plots, partners and practices) of boys at play considering their meaning-making processes. Through participant observation in a full-day Kindergarten, play episodes were documented (i.e., digital videography, photography, audio recording, field notes, collection of artifacts) and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Three broad themes emerged. First, physical and social aspects of the Classroom Play Environment were found to be influential in creating conditions for play, influencing the quality of engagement and learning. Ample time, space, freedom of movement, and access to plentiful creative materials were important in children’s active play and meaning making processes. Common behavourist classroom management techniques were avoided in favour of social constructivist approaches, which promoted children’s self-regulation with an aim to recognize and foster their sense of agency, and support emergent play-literacy practices (Hill & Nichols, 2006). Second, children’s explanations regarding the source and inspiration of play themes and interests prompted a reconsideration of ‘spontaneity’ as foundational to a Definition of Play. Defining play processes as “multiliteracies”, and play episodes as “text”, play ideas were found to be intertextually linked to multiple texts including picture books, multimedia, and iconic texts. Third, Boys' Play was observed to involve much movement combined with rough and tumble, pretend, construction, and word play, prompting a re-consideration of ‘narrative’ within the context of play and literacy research literature. As well, boys inquired about gendered play objects and identities in complex and personal ways. This digital thesis document utilized a multimodal design, embedding visual and audio text, creating a new multimodal thesis form with an aim toward considering all modes of meaning making as equal, rather than emphasizing or privileging print text (Jewitt & Kress, 2003).

The aim of this dissertation is to analytically discern different conversational genres within the teaching of literature, organized within the framework of the two school subjects in which Swedish is taught in upper secondary school, and to place this teaching of literature in a historical context by relating it to different conceptions of the Swedish subject. To be able to achieve this aim, a curriculum studies approach is combined with an ethnographical one. The ethnographical part of the study was conducted as a classroom study, including five different classes and teachers talking about literature, which took place during the school year 2003/2004 at three different schools in the middle of demographical Sweden. This part of the study also involved qualitative interviews with teachers and students concerning different factors which might have an effect on these conversations. The conversations of the study can be described as a part of the every-day-life of the teaching of those subjects, as the teachers organised these conversations in a way that they usually organise conversations of literature in their classes. However, what the teachers meant by talking about literature appeared to differ among them so radically that these conversations could be analytically discerned as four different conversational genres: The Teaching Examination, Text Oriented Talk, Culturally Oriented Talk, and Informal Book Talk. These four conversational genres are possible to analytically discern using the didactical tool, the analysis of conversational genres, which is developed in the dissertation in relation to Michail Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres. The curriculum part of the study comprises an analysis in three steps to place the teaching of literature in a historical context. In the first step national syllabuses for the subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language are analysed. In the second step local syllabuses for the subjects are analysed. Finally, in the third step, the teachers’ thoughts, deliberations and ideals forming their teaching of literature are analysed. The teaching where conversational genres have been analytically discerned could then be related to different conceptions of the subject Swedish: Swedish as a Higher Subject of Bildung, Swedish as a Proficiency Subject, and Swedish as an Experience-based Subject. The analyses and discussions in the dissertation contribute to the discussions in the field of Subject-Didactics on the role of literature and conversation within the subjects of Swedish and Swedish as a Second language. Another contribution of the dissertation is the didactical tool, the analysis of conversational genres, which might be used by researchers and teachers for analysis and reflection on conversations in teaching.

This licentitate thesis is a study of Upper-Secondary School stu-dents’ approach towards reading fiction in the school subject of Swedish from a socio-cultural perspective. Furthermore, the social context and its importance for the students’ reading situation has been mapped. The students participating in the study are all first-graders and boys, studying the Construction Programme. The empirical material consists primarily of oral statements made by the students concerning their perception of how to read fiction in school. Using the construct of Pierre Bourdieu and with the reception model of Kathleen McCormick as a point of departure, the repertoirs of the students are described and analyzed. This study shows that the students bring different representa-tions of their group belonging, which effect their approach to rea-ding fiction. It also shows that the students’ idea of what a reader is and their own reading ability create their approach to reading. Ad-ditionally, the students have problems to see the actual purpose of reading fiction in a school situation. The results of the study show that in order to read fiction success-fully in a classroom situation, the school has to discuss and chal-lenge the students’ views of group belonging. Furthermore the school must improve when it comes to illustrating the more precise purpose and meaning of reading fiction in the school subject of Swedish. The study shows that because of the students’ different approa-ches to reading fiction, they tend to do two types of reading, one in-dividual and one for the school . In the latter, the students are incli-ned to limit their reading potential. And this is the real challenge for the subject of Swedish, but also ultimately the school, to challenge the students to use their full reading potential. Finally, the results of the study is discussed in relation to the new curriculum of the subject of Swedish, as it is presented in the sylla-bus ”Gy 11”. ”Gy 11” has been implemented since the autumn of 2011. Additionally, the consequences of the decreased number of hours for the subject of Swedish is considered. There are, however, stil good possibilities for the Swedish school to enable the students to reach their full reading potential in a class-room sitution.

ABSTRACT This licentiate thesis is a study of the curriculum of the school subject Swedish from a socio-cultural perspective. The aim of the study is to obtain insights into how pupils in the seventh grade of the Swedish secondary school system read films, and further to investigate how the education in Swedish can manage and make the most of various approaches to film. The survey was conducted in a class which I teach myself, and the empirical data consists primarily of oral and written statements by the pupils, concerning the films they have seen. Furthermore the social context around the reception of the films has been mapped. As part of the empirical data there is also a record of a discussion in the classroom concerning filmmaking. With the reception model of Kathleen McCormick as a point of departure, the filmic repertoires of the pupils are analyzed, described and interpreted as they stand out within the framework of the study. The general repertoires of the pupils are also dealt with to some extent. The representations and non-representations of the readings are further discussed in a social semiotic perspective. The research shows that the pupils bring rich experiences of fiction from television as well as film to school. The research also indicates that there is a potential for specific learning processes in the reading of film, since the reception of film entails a possibility to widen the general and filmic repertoires as well as to be conscious of them. The most important potential for learning is in the meeting with films that create a tension between the general repertoires of the reader and the film itself, since the film in those cases stands for something hitherto unknown for the reader. The pupils in my survey do not, however, primarily watch film in order to obtain new experiences, or to learn something; they watch film as a means to feel and share experiences with others in order to strengthen their sense of belonging to a group. One exception appears to be films that the pupils interpret as based on reality, since there is a tendency among the pupils to be more openminded for clashes between their own repertoires and the repertoires in films when it comes to fiction anchored in reality. The true challenge of the teaching is to attract the pupils to develop conscious relationships to films that imply a tension between repertoires. The reasons for these tensions have furthermore to be investigated. When it comes to films based on reality, the study makes it clear that the population of pupils represents a diverse set of attitudes towards the films; some pupils read the films as pure facts, while others read them in a more reflective way, comparing the mediated images of reality in the actual films with other types of experiences. The teaching of Swedish with the intention to take care of the reception of film among school children must be conducted in an awareness of the fact that not all pupils are representing their readings in a way that makes it possible to create meeting places around them within the educational framework. In my view, the education in Swedish for the secondary school must in a more active way open up for the possibility for the pupils to acquire strategies for a conscious handling of their film readings, as well as access to a language by which they can make their representations. The fact that not all pupils are aware of how film can mediate constructions of reality makes it important to take care of the children’s readings in such a way that makes them aware of the semiotic resources of the cinematic medium. This is one reason why one should allow them make their own films. It is also important to use a diversity of semiotic resources when pupils are representing their readings in order to underline the plurality of interpretations and filmic repertoires. Finally, I discuss the results of my research in relation to the new curriculum of Swedish education as it is presented in the syllabus “Lgr 11” which will take effect as from the autumn semester of 2011. In my analysis I find that the space for work of the kind I have conducted in the classroom will be diminished due to the new curriculum. There are, however, still possibilities and a learning potential for a teaching in Swedish that in an active way will take care of film experiences, as well as other kinds of textual experiences.

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Little empirical research has been conducted on what effect task-based reading instruction with reading questions will have on reading comprehension, particularly in the domain of second language reading comprehension. The purpose of this research is to investigate which type of questions, textually explicit (TE) or inferential (IF) questions, will best facilitate text comprehension, and which type will have the most beneficial effect on Japanese EFL learners at three proficiency levels (low, intermediate, and high). In the study, two groups of Japanese senior high school students (N = 69) were classified into three different proficiency groups. One group received instruction emphasizing TE questions while the other received instruction emphasizing IF questions. TE questions are text-bound questions whose answers are locally and explicitly stated in the text. In contrast, IF questions are more knowledge-bound questions whose answers largely depend on readers' cognitive resources, such as relevant linguistic knowledge, background knowledge, world knowledge or context. The different treatments lasted five months. The results were statistically analyzed. The study revealed a significant task effect for reading questions on Japanese EFL learners' reading. Although one type of instruction did not have a significantly better effect than the other, the large between-groups gain gap seems to imply that instruction emphasizing IF questions might facilitate text comprehension more. The study also found that the participants who received instruction emphasizing IF questions benefited from their instruction regardless of proficiency level. With regard to instruction emphasizing TE questions, the higher proficiency participants benefited significantly more from their instruction than the lower proficiency students. The study suggests that reading teachers should use a task-based teaching method with reading questions. If the use of reading questions is already a part of reading teachers' methodology, they should include not only commonly used textually explicit reading questions but also inferential ones. The study suggests that implementing these changes might help break the cycle of translation-bound reading instruction with its overemphasis on lower-level processing, and might lead students to read texts in a more meaningful, interactive way. / CITE/Language Arts

The aim of the present study is, firstly, to investigate the amount of Swedish and French that is produced by teachers and students in the foreign language classroom and, secondly, to examine in which situations the interlocutors code-switch and for what purposes the two languages are used. The study is based on empirical data consisting of audio recordings of interactions taking place in two different classrooms in Sweden. The study is carried out within an interactionist perspective on language teaching and learning, stressing that learning is situated in learners’ social and interactional practices. The empirical material has been categorized into five different groups according to the participation structure of each interaction and then analysed in two different parts, one quantitative and one qualitative. The quantitative analysis of the corpus established that the Swedish language is present in each of the categories. The results of the count of every turn and word pronounced in each language in the corpus show that many turns expressed by both teachers and students consist of a mixture of Swedish and French. This switching between different codes is the main object of the qualitative analysis of the corpus. The results of the qualitative analysis indicate that the participation structure and the choice of activity types and how these are organised in the classroom are decisive for teachers’ and students’ code-switching. Furthermore, the teachers’ actions concerning the choice of language for the interaction as well as their strategies to deal with the presence of both languages are conclusive for the students’ oral production of French in class. The analysis also reveals that the more the teachers use the target language in a consistent way, the more the students try to express themselves in French even if they often code-switch. The study points out the complexity of speaking French in a classroom context, where the teachers have to deal with the fact that the Swedish language is almost always present and used by the learners for different purposes. / IPACLE