Av: Eva Lindqvist (2014)
The present thesis comprises two case studies of two multilingual pupils in second-ary school, focusing on the relationship between knowledge, language and learning through a comparison of literacy activities in the two school subjects, Textile Crafts and Social Studies.The theoretical framework is sociocultural and the research methods include ob-servations, interviews and artifact analysis of the literacy practices in the two sub-jects as well as analyses of spoken and written texts. The latter were performed using multimodal and systemic functional linguistics analyses.The results reveal that both school subjects can be described as mono-linguistic, and that the teachers teach mono- and multilingual pupils in the same way. Also, the two focus students, David and Sarah, were offered various multimodal texts in each of the two school subjects. However, David deflects many of the teachers’ text of-fers in the form of writing in both the literacy practices in both subjects, avoiding having to expose himself to situations in which he is forced to read or write. Sarah, on the other hand, used writing for different purposes and in different ways. Also, the semiotic resources she used were often more advanced and more complex com-pared to those used by David. Another important finding was that the teachers seemed to ”tune in” with the students’, thus enhancing their own choices as to avoid-ing or using the language offered through different semiotic resources.A pedagogical implication of the study concerns how teachers and students are aware of students’ multilingualism and how this linguistic awareness is used in the classroom. This calls for more research on how to create teacher awareness about multilingual students’ need to develop linguistic competence in all school subjects in different languages. Another pedagogical implication is the importance of selecting texts that enable high support in relation to the nature of the task and its objectives, i.e. how texts function in relation to the task and what they afford.
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