The aim of this study is to investigate how a number of 9-10 year old students experience and describe literary characters and how they experience the text’s environment when the description is limited. As I examine this as part of students reading comprehension, I also want to see how they make connections when talking about the current text. By presenting a text for the students where it is not obvious who the narrator is, I have tried to find out how students think when they encounter literary personalities and how they perceive the environment. Students have been listening to Astrid Lindgren's "The dragon with red eyes" and received the instruction that they should concentrate on the narrator who is also a character in the story. The investigation is based on the student illustrations of the narrator and answers from group discussions. The theoretical frame is founded on text-to-text connection, text-to-self connection or text-to-world connection. The investigation shows that the text-to-text and text-to-self connection is closest at hand when the children analyze the literary personality. Maybe their own family constellations have affected their analysis, given that 81.2% of girls illustrated the narrator as a girl. When I analyzed how girls and boys experienced the narrator it shows that the girls more so than boys identified the narrator of their own sex. They could very well make connections when talking about the text and had experienced many internal images in terms of the story, the environment and the narrator.

In this essay, the focus is on descriptions of women and men, by the use of nouns, adjectives and verbs in six textbooks for the subject of Swedish as a second language. The purpose is to examine if and how gender is created in such descriptions. The method used is language analysis, where the focus is on finding noun suffixes in work titles which separate women from men;as well as finding neutral noun titles, generic references, verb processes as well as adjectives used to describe both genders. In a comparison between the two periods, the results indicate that the variation of adjectives used differs between women and men. Specifically, women’s feelings,behaviors and traits are described to a greater extent. Furthermore, gender neutral suffixes appear to a greater extent in the latter period. Finally, the result suggests that women are involved in fewer physical and verbal processes than men in the first period. However, there is an opposite situation in the second period. Also, in both periods, women are involved in a greater number of stereotypical activities situated in a domestic environment, while men participate in stereotypical activities related to the work environment. Therefore, verb processes, as well as nouns and adjectives, create symbolic gender in two periods by the lack of equal recognition of women and men.

Syftet med studien är att bidra med ökad kunskap om huruvida textböcker i historia för årskurs 4–6 beskriver kvinnor och män som dikotomier, dvs isärhållande av könen, samt om detta problematiseras. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkter är genussystemets principer enligt Yvonne Hirdman samt femininitets- och maskulinitetsnormerna. För att skapa ett analysverktyg användes Maria Nikolajevas motsatsschema. Det är en kvalitativ studie med kvantitativa inslag och har textanalys som metod. Fem textböcker i historia årskurs 4–6 analyserades.  Resultatet visade att majoriteten av personbeskrivningarna i textböckerna beskrivs som dikotomier med utgångspunkt i maskulinitets- och femininitetsnormer. Männen tillskrevs främst manliga attribut men också ett fåtal kvinnliga. Kvinnor som beskrivs som enskilda individer i textböckerna tillskrevs huvudsakligen manliga attribut men även ett mindre antal kvinnliga. Samhällsgrupper bestående enbart av kvinnor tillskrevs huvudsakligen kvinnliga attribut, till skillnad från de enskilda kvinnorna.  Resultatet visade att personbeskrivningar och levnadsvillkor inte problematiseras utifrån ett genusperspektiv, varken i brödtexten eller via arbetsmetoder, med undantag av två fall i två olika textböcker. Utöver detta exempel förekom ingen problematisering av könens levnadsvillkor med genusperspektiv.