Lise Iversen Kulbrandstad: Encounters with texts in grade five – minority students learning about spiders

The transition from the 4th to the 5th grade in Norwegian schools is traditionally considered to be especially demanding. The school subjects get more specialized and the textbooks have more subject-specific information and more difficult vocabulary. National tests in reading, English and mathematics are introduced early in the school year. The tests are partly supposed to assist teachers in facilitating students' transition between grades and partly supposed to measure school achievements. On these tests, as well as on results from PIRLS and PISA, an achievement gap between students with immigrant family background and students with majority language background is documented. In the project Encounter with texts in the fifth grade this achievement gap is used as a point of departure. Together with Anne Golden MultiLing, University of Oslo, I  explore what kind of texts and literacy practices the students encounter in class, how students respond to the challenges of meaning making in the context of the mainstream classroom,  and how teachers work on facilitating learning in different subjects. In this presentation, I will report from a pstudy with a focus on fifth graders encounter with a science text book. The data which are analyzed are text book chapters, qualitative interviews with teachers and students, classroom observations and students’ oral and written responses.

 

Lise Iversen Kulbrandstad is a Professor of Norwegian at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and a guest Professor in the teaching of Swedish as a second language at Karlstad University, Sweden. From 2007 to 2015 she was rector of Hedmark University of Applied Sciences. 

Her main research interests are literacy, second language learning, and professional development of teachers in kindergarten and schools. She has been especially engaged in the establishment of research network in the Nordic countries, and was one of the founders of NORDAND, the Nordic journal of second language research. In her PhD (Lesing på et andrespråk. Fire innvandrerungdommer leser læreboktekster i samfunnsfag, University of Oslo 1996) she explored content area literacy. Her current research projects are following up on minority students’ literacy learning across the subject areas: Encounter with texts in the 5th grade together with Professor Anne Golden, MultiLing University of Oslo, and Migration and Transformation of Powerful Knowledge together with the ROSE-group at Karlstad University.