The study is based on qualitative research which aimed to show how four teachers interact in book talks with the students i connection with Swedish lessons in first grade. The study has focused on teachers´ questions to analyze the types of conversational genres that arise in connection with book talks in first grade.  Data was collected through interviews and observations. The interviews and observations were made at a school in the county of Stockholm. Four teachers´ Swedish lessons were observed and they were interviewed about how they describe and explain their use of book talks in Swedish lessons. Hultin´s categorization for speech genres and rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions´ (2006) served as main theoretical frameworks for analyzing the empirical material. From the interviews, I have come to the conclusion that the teachers are aware of different speech genres, and they use rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions for different purposes. The results of the study show that, depending on their purpose with book talk, teachers use different conversational genres.  The reults of the study show that a conversational genre dominated in the book talks that were examined but they also showed elements of other genres to a certain extent. It appears that two conversational genres were dominant in the teaching of teachers, that is, the teaching examination and the text oriented talk. On the other hand the culturally oriented talk and the informal book talk only appeared as compliments to the dominant genres. The study shows that teachers´ awareness of these genres is of great importance for developing the pupils´ reflective minds and skills.

The purpose with this essay is to investigate how different theories about literary competence can help us understand why Sven Delblanc’s novel Änkan and Mara Lee’s novel Ladies have generated so many various interpretations as they have. To fulfill this purpose a comparative study of book reviews about the two novels Änkan and Ladies has been made. The theories about literary competence that have been used in this study are Joseph Appleyard’s theory about reader-roles, Judith Langer’s theory about imaginary worlds and Magnus Persson’s theory about genre perspectives. The results that are presented in this study are that those book reviews that express expectations about the novels as being genre-typical are often more disappointed about the reading experience than those readers who have expectations about the novels as being genre-transgressing and with deeper meaning. The discussion about genres has therefore given an interesting perspective about the correlation between the readers’ expectations and the many, various interpretations that follow.

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.