Læreres vurdering av elevers faglighet i en litterær samtale

Resumé

The Norwegian curriculum highlights spontaneous oral conversation as well as teachers’ formative assessment. An exploratory literary conversation among students is a discipline-specific and spontaneous oral situation well suited for formative assessment. However, previous research has shown that Norwegian teachers are hesitant when defining and assessing students’ conversational competence. In the present study, we investigate how four teacher groups describe students’ literary and oral competence during a literary group conversation among three upper secondary students. Through inductive and theory-driven analyses, we find that the teachers strive to identify strengths in students’ contributions to the conversation. Further, they assess students’ disciplinary knowledge by highlighting textual, intertextual, and performative dimensions of literary competence. Finally, they consider at which stage of the learning process this kind of conversation can be integrated in a meaningful way. The results form the basis for a discussion about what kind of conceptualizations of literary and oral competence that come into play in the teachers’ assessment, as well as what kind of value the teachers attribute to the literary conversation as a source of insight into the students’ literary competence in the disciplinary story.