Skriftspråksutveckling under högstadiet

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 study showed that text length increases overall during the examined years, but the increase tapers off towards the end. Word length and word variation also increase, but the rate of increase does not seem to decline in the same way text length does. There was some correlation between text length and high grades, but the two other measures, word length and word variation, were found to correlate more regularly with high grades. The quantitative investigation of voice showed that the use of voice increases between school years 5 and 8 and then decreases. However, when the different types of voice were investigated in detail, it was found that pupils developed more sophisticated strategies for ”voice loans”. This was particularly characteristic of texts that received high grades. 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 dominant, average word length turned out to be much higher. It was also found that referring and referred voice dominates the voice loans of texts that concern facts but quoting and quoted voice dominates the voice loans of fictional texts.