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Formal aspects of language and literacy have often been foregrounded in research on early writing. While these aspects have given us valuable insights in how children write, few studies have focused content aspects in young children’s texts. This study focuses content aspects through a socio semiotic analysis of transitivity as well as a content-thematic analysis of narrative texts written by children of ages 8 to 9.[1]

Research questions: 

RQ1: What linguistic resources regarding the system of transitivity are used by the students in their writing of narrative texts?

RQ2: What content-themes are (re)constructed in the analyzed texts?

The analyzed data consists of 38 narrative texts written in relation to two comparable writing assignments, asking the students to write about “the future” and “another world”, respectively. The results of the study show that the two assignments opened up two very dissimilar so-called Content-Thematic Spaces. The first assignment, on writing about “the future”, resulted in texts in which the children wrote about their own materialistic success through mainly relational but also material processes (monothematic monotransitive texts). In contrast, the other assignment, on writing on “another world”, resulted in texts about a number of themes with a bigger variation of process types (polythematic polytransitive texts). The main contribution of the study is that by using this method I show, on the on hand, the variation of worlds created by the students in relation to the task formulations. On the other hand, I suggest how we can talk about content in early school writing, something that can serve asprerequisites for a critical discussion of what writing narratives entail.  The results also contribute to our understanding of what disciplinary literacy of L1-education in Sweden is. 

[1]The study uses data from the larger research project Function, content and form in interaction. Students’ text-making in early school years (led by professor Caroline Liberg of Uppsala University and funded by the Swedish Research Council 2013-2016[18]).