To Örebro University

This thesis focuses on nine children’s use of texts and literacy learning, both inside and outside of school, in a multilingual and multicultural setting in Sweden. The study investigates and maps texts that children encounter and use in their everyday lives, and explores what they do with them. The study also aims to investigate the conditions and possibilities of local literacies, exploring children’s meaning-making, identity-making and literacy learning through texts. By using an ethnographic approach involving participant observations, group and individual interviews, surveys and photographs, extended empirical data have been collected.

Theoretically and in analysing empirical material, the study draws on research from New Literacy Studies and critical literacy. Concepts from the Four Resources Model (Luke & Freebody, 1999) as well as literary envisioning (Langer, 1995, 2011) and hermeneutic perspectives (Gadamer, 1975; Ricoeur, 1984, 1982) have inspired the analysis of the empirical material. The outcomes of the study may be used as a basis for the educational development of literacy learning during the middle school years 3–5.

The repertoire of texts outside of school can be described as multi-faceted and multimodal and involves a massive amount of information. At the same time, inside school, major emphasis is put on formal training in skills such as spelling and grammar, while the repertoires of coding, functional use, meaning making and the critique of texts are altogether unorchestrated.

The overall conclusion of the thesis is that literacy education must create opportunities for children to develop and build on their chronological memories of books, films, computer games and chatting on the Internet, so that they can view themselves as readers, meaning-makers and citizens that are able to critique, question, change and redesign texts.