Students’ Resources for Stance-taking in the Literature Classroom

Making aspects of privileged ways of participating visible is central to support students’ literacy development within different educational disciplines (Hasan, 1996, 2011). In my doctoral work I focus on the discipline of literature in lower secondary school in the school subject of Danish, exploring students’ resources for stance-taking in their written literary response texts. In my presentation on Friday I will outline the theoretical grounding of the study and the preliminary findings. Drawing on the appraisal system within SFL (Hood, 2011; Martin & White, 2005) and the dimension of specialization within LCT (Maton, 2007, 2010), my analyses show a variation in students’ interpersonal meaning-making choices, linking their literary response texts within the same task to either primarily a knower or a knowledge code. This variation suggests a tension in the literature education at this time of schooling, and as such the study aims at supporting discussions of privileged ways of participating and of co-constructing codes in the discipline, and thereby support the lower secondary teacher in a visible pedagogy.