This ethnographic study in education, based on observations, audio-visual recordings and interviews, explored pupils' supportive interactions in a year eight class at a Swedish school. Goffman's dramaturgical theory of the presentation of self was used as a theoretical framework with a focus on the pupils' interactions with their classmates in…

This article explores how arguments are made in student essays through the use of writing and visual resources. The data set comprises 54 essays with a passing grade from students in their final year of upper secondary school in Sweden. The data is analysed using a multimodal approach to knowledge representation on arguments in essays, involving…

This study explores literature reading and reception of narrative texts among Swedish middle school students. Through a written assignment and a think-aloud protocol, students' comprehension and interpretation of narrative texts are investigated. The study shows that Swedish middle school students tend to focus mainly on the plot. The main…

In contemporary ways of thinking about education there is an enhanced focus on individual students' results and less on students' collaborative processes for attaining good results. This may appear peculiar, given that the Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school states that students should be given opportunities to compose texts…

Concerns related to school are consistently ranked as among the greatest stressors in the lives of adolescents. Research from varying contexts report rising rates of school-related stress among students, but we currently lack knowledge on what drives these trends. The aim of this study is to investigate the predictors of temporal trends in…

Scholars have long questioned the impact of teacher education programmes. Persistent claims are that pre-service teachers have fixed ideas about pedagogy when they enter training and that they become enculturated once in the profession. Within physical education (PE), similar concerns have been raised with respect to ball games. Research suggests…

In Sweden, grades are used for selection to upper-secondary school and higher education, even though agreement in teachers' grading is low and the selection therefore potentially unfair. Furthermore, measures taken to increase the agreement have not been successful. This study has explored how to increase agreement in teachers' grading by…

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four…

This book provides a rich and unique longitudinal account of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The chapters report on the findings from a large-scale, three-year research project undertaken at senior high school level in Sweden. The ecological perspective, with quantitative and qualitative methods, gives voice to both learners and…

In this article, I examine the relation between literacy events and literacy practices in classroom interaction and add to ongoing discussions in the field of NLS about the transcontextual nature of literacy and how local literacy events are linked to broader literacy practices. It specifically focuses on how the link between literacy events and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore Swedish children's positive experiences of health and well-being, and their thoughts on how health literacy can be promoted. Design/methodology/approach: Totally, 121 schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 14 from three schools in two municipalities in the northern part of Sweden shared their…

This study investigates homework in Swedish lower secondary schools: teachers' perceptions and experiences about it and their understanding of its potentials and challenges for students' learning and development. Data collected through an online survey (N = 201) mixed standardized questions and open questions. Descriptive statistics and…

This article focuses on the question of access and design in literacy education. Drawing on an ethnographical study, two children's experiences of texts1 and socialisation in relation to literacy are mirrored through the Four Resources Model (Luke & Freebody, 1999). What does access and design mean in relation to this model and how is it…

This article focuses on class blogs and presents results from 1:1 schools in Sweden. While Swedish schools are increasingly using Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., wikis and blogs), most of this use is still at an experimental stage. To further the understanding of how blogs are and can be used, we compare class blogs used in practice with the…

This article focuses on teaching "about" and "for" cultural diversity. More specifically, we look at the manner in which different types of teacher feedback either support or hinder student interaction and student learning. We identified seven types of feedback that were used in classroom discussions with 14-15-year-old…