Man liksom bara skriver skrivande och skrivkontexter i grundskolans år 7 och 8

Sammanfattning: You just kind of write. Writing and writing contexts in the years 7 and 8 of the compulsory school.This thesis deals with writing and writing contexts in the latter part of the Swedish compulsory school and with the interrelationship between the individual and the context, between the pupil, the teacher, the instruction of writing in the short and long perspective and the school as organization and institution. The general aim of the study is to deepen the understanding of school writing and its conditions by describing, analysing and interpreting the writing instruction from the teachers’, the pupils’ and my own perspectives. Fieldwork for my ethnographic study was conducted in two parallel classes, 36 pupils in all, over three terms in which all texts written during Swedish lessons were gathered. The theoretical framework is the sociocultural approach based on research by Vygotsky and Bachtin. Six texts written by three pupils regarding structure, style and teacher’s written response and the instruction in connection with the writing are analysed. The instruction in the long perspective is analysed with regard to what extent it offered the pupils coherence in their studies. To analyse the instruction in an organizational and institutional view concepts from Berg’s studies on school cultures and Langer’s research on effective American schools are used.One major result is that the task, the receiver, the teacher’s response and the non-dialogic classrooms are factors with great impact on the pupils’ texts. Most tasks require that the pupil’s private, personal life and experiences are focused, e.g. in the many narrative texts, whereas discursive texts are not represented at all in the material. The instruction in the long perspective can in the main be characterised as catalogues, i.e. it does not lead to knowledge-in-action and is similar to Swedish as a proficiency subject. As to teacher response it is not possible to see any progression during the three terms but the same aspects are commented on in most texts in both classes and do not improve the texts. The culture and traditions of the school are important influencing factors in the teaching. One reason for this is the lack of in-service training of the teachers when the new steering system of the Swedish school was introduced in the middle of the 1990’s. When organizations undergo fundamental changes traditions seem to exercise greater influence on actors than otherwise. Time has great impact on school activities and three conflicting concepts of time are present at school: the pupil’s activity time, the teacher’s linear time and the institutional time. The work teams play a vital role for the teachers but the care of the pupils take most of their time. Pedagogic and didactic discussions are rare and subject matters have no forum at all. Many of the factors in the writing contexts are institutionally influenced and hence difficult to change but teachers and pupils are actors in school as organization and institution. This means that they can reproduce or transform the structures. In this there are developmental potentials.