The aim of the dissertation is to demonstrate and explain the place and function writing has in all subjects in two vocational classes in a Swedish upper secondary school. The material has been collected through ethnographic field studies in construction and health care classes over one school year. The material consists of literacy events, where pupils write, and the context of situation and text are noted. In theoretical terms the study takes a discourse analysis perspective, where writing is seen from within different frames. Writing is analysed based on an ideological view of literacy inspired by New Literacy Studies using the context of situation and text with the aim of describing different literacy practices in both classes. The material was classified into three different situation types, two school-initiated and one non-school-initiated. The first school-initiated situation type is orally-governed, the second writing-governed, while it is less clear how the non-school-initiated type is inspired. In the writing situations we investigate the writing activities that are used, while texts are analysed based on text acitivites. Writing and text activities are used together to explain the writing competences that are used in the writing situations. The conclusions are that writing gets little space and attention in both classes. The health care class writes in more situations and also writes longer texts than the construction class. Literacy practices differ between the classes. The health care class demonstrates one school-governed writing practice, while the construction class moves between two different school-governed practices. The literacy practices in the construction class are similar to the writing usage that can be found at a building site. Writing is used in both classes mainly to structure and store knowledge. The non-school-governed material also shows differences between the classes. Here too more writing takes place in the health care class. The function of the non-school-governed writing is to communicate and inform through writing.

This study is based on the presumption that language is fundamental to the construction of knowledge. In addition, linguistic demands are incorporated in the policy documents of the upper secondary edu­cation of Sweden; students shall, during their education, be given the opportunity to appropriate certain linguistic tools. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how teachers and students in upper secondary education manage and utilize the discourse of social science in both speech and writing. More specifically, two classes are studied during three terms. The teachers’ ability to organize and support the students vocally and in written is examined, so are the effects of the teaching on students’ writing. The origin of the study is constituted by a sociocultural stance provided by Vygotskij, Bakhtin and Halliday. A combination of a functional perspective on language and a cognitive is probed, where the study is comparative in nature consisting of an experimental class and a control class. The importance of language for the creation of knowledge has been communicated to the teachers of the experimen­tal class, with provided complementary subject didactic literature. This literature offers support for teachers to augment the use of explicit teaching and enhance student awareness of how conceptual structures mould social science. Qualitative analyses are performed on the basis of teacher-student dialogue and written tasks by a group of selected students. The ana­lytical tools object language – metalanguage, linguistic operations and knowledge structures are developed for the purpose of processing data, and have been combined with the tools activity analysis, subject-related concepts and text activity. The results from the analyses display no difference in the handling of the discourse of social science between the experimental class and the control class. The teachers of the experimental class, like the teacher of the control class, are primarily utilizing object language where knowledge structures are visible, as opposed to a combination of object language – metalanguage. Furthermore, they exhibit diminutive use of dialogue in their teaching. The students of both classes, on their hand, demon­strate an equal progress in textual development. This study concludes that the experimental class has not been provided with sufficiently explicit support to advance in the struc­turing of knowledge and in level of reasoning. A more efficient support to teachers to manage these analytical tools would, in all probability, give them, and through this the students, an increasingly profound insight into structuring of text activities, the meaning and signalling of linguistic operations, the construction of subject-related concepts and, most importantly, how these three tools are interrelated.