Klassrummet som muntlig arena. Att bygga och etablera ethos

Sammanfattning: The Class Room as an Oral Arena: Building and Establishing Ethos starts with the premise that every person who wants to act credibly as a democratic citizen must have a communicative competence. Democracy and communicative competence are closely linked. To communicate credibly is to communicate with ethos. The purpose of this dissertation is to study how students in Swedish gymnasium build and establish ethos and how they develop their communicative competence. The Swedish gymnasium is equivalent to three years of study in upper secondary school. When the students start gymnasium they form a new group and start building and establishing their ethos. Therefore the study was done during the student’s first year in gymnasium. The class studied had 29 students in a program of social studies. The main method in the study has been participant observation and qualitative interviews. The material is composed of notes, interviews, video and tape recordings, supplemented by written material from the students. The empirical material is analysed in four different chapters devoted to oral presentations, teaching, feedback and the response-situation, and practise and examination. The study focuses on the students' ability to build and establish ethos during oral presentations. The results show that building and establishing ethos should be regarded as different processes in the classroom. To build ethos is a process that precedes the performance, while establishing ethos occurs in the oral performance before the class. The results also show that various forms of response are very important for the manner in which the student builds and establishes ethos. It is also important that the teacher has a meta-language for oral presentations to give constructive feedback. The result also shows that the staging of exercises and test situations for oral performances affects the students' building and establishing ethos. In these exercises ethos is a variable concept, while the test situation triggers a school ethos which can be described as rigid. The reason is primarily that in the exercises the students can try different ways to express ethos, while in the oral performance the students are expected to express a personal ethos. Students can rarely practice a personal ethos. In the test situation they perform a school ethos that is perceived as foreign both to speakers and listeners in the classroom. A final result is that the teaching situation where speakers, listeners, and content are given the same attention is the teaching situation where the students can build and establish that ethos which enhances their communicative competence.