Ett möte mellan två skrivkulturer Några högstadieungdomars syn på och bruk av skrift vid skol- respektive privatskrivande

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to shed light on and describe a number of secondary school students’ writing practices and their attitudes towards these practices.The material used in the study comes from a secondary school in a suburb of Stockholm where most of the students are bilingual. The entire study comprises five different smaller studies: a questionnaire, a number of interviews, classroom observations, observations of one particular boy’s writing practices and studies of the same boy’s texts.The results of these smaller studies show that a form of encounter between two different writing cultures probably takes place in school. These two writing cultures are, on the one hand, one that is concerned with the students’ school work and, on the other, one that constitutes the private writing culture in which young people indulge when they are not occupied with school work. The study shows that there are obvious differences between these two cultures when it comes to students’ attitudes to writing. Their attitudes to private writing are far more positive than to school writing. A further finding of the study is that there are evident differences between the attitudes of girls and boys to writing, although these are most obvious in the students’ school writing. In private writing the differences are smaller, although some boys claim not to write at all in private, even though they send a great many text messages.One possible implication of the study is that school writing would probably benefit from a widening of the concept of writing to become amore communicative form of writing.