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This dissertation investigates teaching and learning in social studies, grades 7 to 9, in a linguistically heterogenous classroom. 26 % of the students have a foreign background, the same level as the average in Swedish compulsory school. The aim is to contribute with research that broadens and deepens ways to make visible, discuss and understand disciplinary literacy in social studies.

Theoretical perspectives used are critical-constructive Didaktik, a sociocultural view of literacy and disciplinary literacy and social semiotics, perspectives used to examine two disciplinary literacy areas: how subject words are processed with expansions and how second-order concepts in social science education are expressed in teaching and in student texts. The empirical material consists of 19 observations, 16 student texts and 24 interviews.

In the observed class, the social studies teaching is mainly oral and teacher-led: the teacher processes subject words and content in dialogue with the students. The analyses of how subject words are processed show that expansion-elaboration (e.g. exemplification) is the most common kind of processing subject words in oral teaching, whereas students more often use expansion-extension (e.g. addition) and expansion-enhancement (e.g. specification through time, place, circumstance) to process subject words in their texts.

The second-order concept social science causality (cause-effect) is expressed to the highest degree, in teaching as well as in student texts. The second-order concepts in social science education often appear in simple form at an individual level (locally) but could be a starting point for discussions of more subject-specific and global societal issues.

Students encounter disciplinary literacy in the form of processing subject words and expressing second-order concepts in social science education in an oral context. Everyday language is mainly used, both in teaching and in student texts. The results show that many multilingual as well as monolingual students need teacher support in different forms, to deepen reasoning and to express disciplinary literacy in social studies.

Some words emerge that may help to make visible, discuss and understand disciplinary literacy in social studies: content-building structural elements and activity chains, expansions, second-order concepts of social science and a subject-specific contribution to a Language-Oriented Content Teaching (LOCT).