The aim of this dissertation is to analytically discern different conversational genres within the teaching of literature, organized within the framework of the two school subjects in which Swedish is taught in upper secondary school, and to place this teaching of literature in a historical context by relating it to different conceptions of the Swedish subject.
To be able to achieve this aim, a curriculum studies approach is combined with an ethnographical one. The ethnographical part of the study was conducted as a classroom study, including five different classes and teachers talking about literature, which took place during the school year 2003/2004 at three different schools in the middle of demographical Sweden. This part of the study also involved qualitative interviews with teachers and students concerning different factors which might have an effect on these conversations. The conversations of the study can be described as a part of the every-day-life of the teaching of those subjects, as the teachers organised these conversations in a way that they usually organise conversations of literature in their classes. However, what the teachers meant by talking about literature appeared to differ among them so radically that these conversations could be analytically discerned as four different conversational genres: The Teaching Examination, Text Oriented Talk, Culturally Oriented Talk, and Informal Book Talk. These four conversational genres are possible to analytically discern using the didactical tool, the analysis of conversational genres, which is developed in the dissertation in relation to Michail Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres.
The curriculum part of the study comprises an analysis in three steps to place the teaching of literature in a historical context. In the first step national syllabuses for the subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language are analysed. In the second step local syllabuses for the subjects are analysed. Finally, in the third step, the teachers’ thoughts, deliberations and ideals forming their teaching of literature are analysed. The teaching where conversational genres have been analytically discerned could then be related to different conceptions of the subject Swedish: Swedish as a Higher Subject of Bildung, Swedish as a Proficiency Subject, and Swedish as an Experience-based Subject.
The analyses and discussions in the dissertation contribute to the discussions in the field of Subject-Didactics on the role of literature and conversation within the subjects of Swedish and Swedish as a Second language. Another contribution of the dissertation is the didactical tool, the analysis of conversational genres, which might be used by researchers and teachers for analysis and reflection on conversations in teaching.
Örebro: Örebro universitet , 2006.
conversational genres/speech genres, classroom interaction, teaching of literature, curriculum studies, ethnography, classroom research