Students' work with literary concepts in digitally rich L1 classrooms

Abstract

This article explores students’ learning trajectories in digitalized classrooms as they work with literary concepts in first language (L1) education. Using a multimodal conversation analysis approach, we investigate the emerging activities and epistemic stances that students take when attempting to explain and apply the concepts. Departing from socio-cultural understandings of learning as constituted in interaction, we analyze how students display their understandings with a specific interest in the role of digital resources in the evolving learning trajectories. This research data consists of video-recorded interactions from Swedish and Finnish upper-secondary school classrooms, including the students’ work on their computers and/or smartphones. We demonstrate how digital resources support students in finding suitable explanations for concepts that from a pragmatic view help them solve given tasks. However, it seems that digital resources do not help students develop their everyday understanding of concepts into an academic understanding, which would enable them to apply these concepts in literary analysis.