Skriftspråksutveckling under högstadiet

Sammanfattning: Abstract The aim of this thesis is to characterize patterns of development in texts written by pupils in secondary school in Sweden. The thesis applies both a traditional quantitative approach to 318 texts and an approach based on the concept voice to 266 texts. The texts were written by the same 31 pupils through school years five to nine, thus the overall approach is also a longitudinal one. The first approach shows that text length is increasing at an overall during the examined years, but the increase is declining succinctly. The second result is that word length and word variation also increases, but is not declining in the same fashion as text length did. When special attention was given to grade in relation to high values from the measures, it was found that a lot of individual deviations were to be found. The two other measures, word length and word variation, were found to have more regularly high values when the text also had a high grade. The second approach’s quantitative investigation showed that voice is increasing between school year 5 and 8, but that it, after the text written in school year 8, began to decrease. But when singular types of voice were investigated, some of these increased rapidly in the end of the investigated period of time. Such types of voices were also more represented amongst texts that had been granted a higher grade. Thus different strategies of managing the use of voice loans (including strategies used to manipulate these) developed, but mainly within the latest years of the investigated period of time, and mainly within texts that had a higher grade. Some pupils did not develop such strategies at all, and some did develop them, but only partially. The two approaches showed significant differences between text types, e.g. in texts where a specialized vocabulary was dominating, average word length turned out to be much higher. Another example is that referring and referred voice dominates the voice loans of texts that concerns facts but quoting and quoted voice dominates the voice loans of fictional texts. Keywords: Secondary school, junior high school, pupil, writing development, longitudinal approach, direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect speech, voice, projection, word length, text length, word variation, text analysis.