Stig-Börje Asplund

‘Ellie is the coolest’: class, masculinity and place in vehicle engineering students’ talk about literature in a Swedish rural town school

This article aims to show how boys in a vehicle engineering programme at an upper secondary school in Sweden use their reading and literature discussion in their identity construction and how the classroom is converted into a place where the boys create the social space that they are a part of. This article is written in the intersections between different disciplines, research fields, and theoretical and methodological perspectives, and it is argued that this approach makes it possible to exceed each respective limitation and present a more nuanced and far-reaching discussion about how children use literature discussions in the construction of identity and place.

Being a skilled reader: Reception patterns in vehicle engineering students’ literature discussion

This article explores how four male vehicle engineering students at an upper secondary school in Sweden engage in literature discussion. The study combines a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach with a reception theory perspective and shows that the boys use direct reported speech (DRS) in their interaction as a technique to handle intimate and personal dimensions in the text, but also to construct themselves as skilled readers. Approaching the empirical data in this way makes it possible to go beyond the stereotyped images of (working class) boys presented in so many research papers and provide a more nuanced picture of boys’ reception pattern in a school context.

Learning How (and How Not) to Weld: Vocational Learning in Technical Vocational Education

ABSTRACT This article focuses on vocational learning in technical vocational education in upper-secondary school, with a special focus on the object of learning to weld. A concrete teaching situation where the learning object to weld is the focus of the interaction between a vocational teacher and an upper-secondary student was documented by a video camera and then analysed from two different perspectives: a conversation analytical perspective and a variation theory perspective. The combination of the two perspectives allows a study of learning that deals with issues regarding both form and content, which may increase our understanding of vocational learning in technical vocational education in upper-secondary school.

Young working-class men do not read: or do they? Challenging the dominant discourse of reading

ABSTRACT In the majority of the research on boys’ and young men’s relation to reading, it is argued that boys and young men read too little, read poorly and in all the wrong ways. However, few studies focus on how boys and young men read the texts they do encounter. In particular, there is a lack of research on young men of working-class background, whose relationship to reading is stressed as particularly problematic in many studies. In this article, we approach the reader histories of three young working-class men from a life story perspective, on the basis of a broad definition of text and reading, to capture how reading and texts are used in their identity construction. Our analysis shows that the young men engage in reading in different ways, from listening to audio books and reading aloud to watching films. We argue that our approach makes it possible to re-envision working-class men as readers who, among other things, use reading to construct softer masculinities, thus challenging the dominant narrative of working-class masculinity and working-class men’s relationship to reading and texts.

Body Talk: Moving beyond speech when analysing literature discussions

The intent of this article is to promote a methodological approach to the analysis of literature discussions by adopting a conversational analytic approach that views embodied actions (including talk) as multimodal. It is argued that this analytic approach moves beyond previous studies that focus on talk only, when analysing literature discussions, and further, that such an approach contributes to an increase in our understanding of the complex meaning-making processes that are set into play when students interact on literary texts in school.

Navigating between disorder and control: Challenges and choices when teaching reading strategies in the L1 classroom

Conversations about texts are often presented in research as particularly beneficial to students’ reading development, based on the argument that the opportunity to confront, discuss and negotiate ...