Att synliggöra vokabulär. En kvantitativ studie av gymnasieelevers skrivuppgifter på svenska inom CLISS-projektets ram

Sammanfattning: This licentiate thesis describes the investigation of students’ texts written in L1, by CLIL and non-CLIL students participating in the CLISS-project during their three-year Upper Secondary School period, 2011-2014. The thesis focuses on the academic language proficiency in Swedish, where the practices of certain linguistic features characterizing academic texts are investigated. The two groups of students involved in the study, a total number or 240, are students who have Swedish as the main language of instruction, the non-CLIL-group, and students who have English as the main language of instruction, the CLIL-group. Both groups follow the Swedish National Curriculum for Upper Secondary School (Lgy11, 2011) and, in learning Swedish, both groups have had mandatory Swedish teaching. In this study, 520 texts were examined, written at four different times during the students’ upper secondary education, the aim being to identify and study students’ productive vocabulary in written assignments. Quantitative measures, such as text length, word length, words longer than six letters and word variation index were examined (see Magnusson & Johansson Kokkinakis 2009, Vagle 2005). Corpus linguistic methods were also applied to identify the usage of nominalizations, verbs in the passive tense and academic words, which are features of academic prose (Halliday & Martin 1993, Jansson et al 2012, Schleppegrell 2004). In addition, lexical profiling (Nation & Anthony 2016), identifying some of the most frequent words in Swedish, was carried out to visualize the general vocabulary and to explore to what degree the students’ vocabulary contained the most frequent and common words or if, and to what extent, they used low- frequency words. The results are reported as means of the two student groups, CLIL and non-CLIL and also gender. The results were furthermore analyzed by using SPSS, version 22. The various parameters were used to explore the vocabulary use and to see if there were any differences or similarities in the vocabulary use between CLIL and non-CLIL students and male and female students. The findings show that the results varied both within and between both groups. The boys in the CLIL group showed the highest means for several of the measured aspects but strong individuals were found in all four groups, i.e. males and females and CLIL and non-CLIL. The results also showed minor usage of features of academic prose. This indicates that explicit education concerning academic writing and the awareness of “the language of schooling” in L1, would be favorable for all students, regardless of language of instruction.