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Writing Education

The more specific relations between students’ writing and metalinguistic repertories.

Description


In the project, we explore what characterises the more specific relationships between students' writing and metalinguistic repertoires in different writing situations in the school subject Danish L1 in Years 5 (age 11) and 8 (age 14). It is a qualitative text and classroom study in which we follow eight classes from six different schools through two teaching units that include an argumentative and a fictional narrative writing assignment, respectively. The participating teachers decide for themselves the more specific genres. As part of the study, we also conduct text interviews with focus students about what they like or think works well in their written texts. The main aims of this project are twofold: To contribute to further theorisation of the field of knowledge and to gain new empirical insights through nuanced examples of the relationship between the students' writing and metalinguistic repertoires. To arrive at this, we conduct a number of sub-studies, in which we examine student texts, text interviews and the observed writing units. We also describe trajectories of metalanguage about texts and language within and across specific contexts. Key theoretical concepts in the project are choice, creativity, agency and voice. A societal purpose of the project is to create knowledge and insights that are relevant to support middle and lower secondary students' writing in Danish, and thus, in a larger perspective, also their opportunities for participation and development of meaning-making possibilities in and beyond L1 education.  

The project includes a PhD and a postdoc.

Timeline and funding


The research project runs from September 1st, 2022, until August 31st, 2025.

Carlsberg Foundation awarded DKK 3,6 million to the project (Semper Ardens Accelerate).

Publications


Manual for analyse af elevers metasproglige repertoire

Working paper in the project Writing Educating (2022-25)
By Kristine Kabel, Mette Vedsgaard Christensen, Morten Tannert, Lise Olsen og Sanne Floor Bendixen

Participants

Participants from the Danish School of Education (DPU)

Kristine Kabel , Associate Professor , Danish School of Education - Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies, Emdrup
Lise Olsen , PhD Fellow , Danish School of Education - Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies, Emdrup
Morten Tannert , Postdoc , Danish School of Education - Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies, Aarhus

Louise Bang, research assistant, DPU, Aarhus University

Participants from VIA University College

Mette Vedsgaard Christensen, PhD, Associate Professor, VIA University College

Sanne Floor Bendixen, Assistant Professor, VIA University College

Advisory board

Debra Myhill, Professor Emerita, Exeter University

Jimmy van Rijt, Associate Professor, Utrecht University

Jenny W. Folkeryd, Professor, Uppsala University

Lene Cicilie Storgaard, PhD, Associate Professor, UC Copenhagen

The PhD project

The preliminary title of the PhD project is "Student writing in context – a qualitative and explorative study of student texts and writing assignments in Danish L1". The study explores how students from a Year 5 and a Year 8 class create voice through linguistic choices in their own texts in various writing situations. The writing situations are explored with particular focus on the initial writing assignments from the Danish L1 teaching units, but other contextual factors are also included in the analysis of the student texts.

The postdoc project

The postdoc project is a corpus-linguistic study of how students create a stance in argumentative student texts, and how it might vary and change across school years. Specifically, the focus is on 'stance' and 'engagement', which are interpersonal linguistic features in the texts that express a writer's attitudes (stance), as well as the writer's involvement and dialogue with other voices in the text (engagement).