Upper secondary students’ discursive writing in two languages

Abstract

This longitudinal study examines one central dimension of discursive essay writing, viz. text structure. It presents results from 40 upper secondary school students’ argumentative and expository texts, four essays in Swedish and four in English (N=320) written during the students’ three years upper-secondary schooling. In addition, three students’ writing progression in eight tasks is presented as cases. The study contributes to the knowledge about upper-secondary school students’ written discursive development in two languages, Swedish (L1) and English (L2). The research is informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the texts were analyzed for logical structure, defined as the cultural norms for clear organization of texts in more academic or formal contexts. The analysis comprised three levels: (1) the global level (text structure in steps and general organization), (2) the paragraph level (paragraphing supporting the global structure), and (3) the linguistic level (language related discursive markers). Based on the analyses of different levels, an overall assessment of logical structure was made. The results show that the progression in terms of text structure largely failed to occur and neither the choice of language or different text types (argumentative and expository texts) shaped students’ ability to structure their text.

A review of Scandinavian writing research between 2010 and 2020

“…Writing was considered to be a complement. In two studies, the development of the use of semiotic resources was investigated (Apelgren et al, 2020;Piekut, 2018). In a longitudinal study covering all three years in upper secondary school, Apelgren and Holmberg (2020) explored a central dimension of discursive essay writing that is the logical text structure, in argumentative and expository texts in the subject areas Swedish and English.…”