"Meningen är att ni ska kunna ert tal" : En studie om det förberedda talets undervisningspraktik i svenska på gymnasiet

Sammanfattning: “The point is that you should be able to know your speech”. A study of the teaching practice of prepared speech, in upper-secondary school Swedish.Cristina JarlThis licentiate study explores the discursive construction of the classroom practice of teachers and students preparing a formal speech, within the Swedish language teaching. The explicit focus is on the teaching situation prior to the students’ prepared speech, and the actions per-formed by the actors within the language teaching context. The overall aim of the thesis is to increase the knowledge of teaching prepared speech as a social practice, by specifically describ-ing, analyzing, and problematizing the students’ opportunities to develop knowledge, connected to prepared speech in the language teaching classroom. By focusing on the instructional pro-cesses that lead to the delivery of the prepared speech this thesis contributes to new insights about the desired knowledge in the students’ prepared speech in school. The research questions guiding the investigation deal with aspects such as social actions, circulating discourses and the students’ subject positions as speakers in the teaching of prepared speech.A focused ethnography method was used, defined by short and intense periods of fieldwork engaging in a specific group activity in a social environment. The data production took place in two teaching groups, in two different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The empirical data consist of observations, sound and video recordings, field notes and texts produced by both teachers and students. During data production, the teaching alternated between on-site and online teaching due to the Corona pandemic. The classroom practice is explored as a social practice and as a discursive arena, where different perceptions exist. Social actors use discourse to mediate action, in which discourse impacts their ways of doing and being. By applying me-diated discourse analysis it is possible to study the complex relations between social action and discourse.The main findings suggest that teachers and students tend to focus more on the form and the production of the speech, and less on the specific subject content of the speech. The results display prominent and sometimes contradictory dichotomies in the teaching of speech: aspects of the prepared speech involve on one hand the practical, the spoken and the corporeal, and on the other hand the theoretical, the written and the visual. Additionally, the study illustrates the fixed and mobile dimensions of Swedish as a school subject. The importance of a speaker’s credibility shows a dynamic tension between students’ strategic, institutional and social posi-tions as a speaker. A concluding remark in the present study is that it seems important for the students to speak and having something to say, in a certain form and packaging, rather than what they have to say and why. Therefore the key instructional questions of what, why and who in terms of teaching prepared speech open up for further discussion.