This study focuses on disciplinary literacy in primary craft education. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialised ways of reading, writing, and speaking in a particular discipline. In Finland, crafts is an obligatory school subject, and pupils are supposed to conceive and manage a complete crafts process, including documentation. However, disciplinary literacy in crafts has rarely been studied, let alone at the primary level. In this study, we explored the quality of a sample of work descriptions produced by third-graders. The data included digitally produced work descriptions (N=79) written by 42 third-grade pupils in a Finnish primary school. Based on a qualitative analysis, six main dimensions of work descriptions as a textual genre emerged: word count, crafts vocabulary, structure, spelling, multimodality, and self-assessment. The quality of work descriptions was analysed quantitatively according to scoring criteria based on these dimensions. A cluster analysis indicated that there were three groups of work descriptions with respect to their level of disciplinarity: limited, emerging, and advanced descriptions. The results show that the structure of the disciplinary texts develops first, and subject-specific vocabulary stabilises after that. The paper discusses the foundation for disciplinary literacy in primary craft education.

Designing writing assignments for pupils is a complex task. The teacher must make a lot of choices regarding what type of text to write, what the purpose of the writing should be, which audience the texts should have etc. Although formulating assignments is important for writing instruction, there has been limited insight into teachers’ choices regarding these aspects or the significance of the different school subjects when making such choices. We explore findings from a Norwegian intervention study on writing in primary school. The data includes 687 writing assignments designed by teachers for pupils in grades 3–7. Gee’s concept of semiotic domains forms the theoretical scope. Our research question is: What opportunities and challenges arise in teachers’ assignment design regarding different functional dimensions and semiotic domains? We show examples of how semiotic domains can collide, and that the combination of acts of writing, purpose, and audience can lead to assignments that are almost impossible to answer in a good way. We visualize the complexity of assignment design in a model which also is transferable to other contexts of assignment design.

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the language used in the teaching and learning of writing in a composition program in a public university in the United States. The objective was to identify metaphors and metonymies employed to construct an official standpoint of writing and the teaching of writing within the program, to identify the ideological position of the views conveyed in the documents and to analyze how this perspective is passed down hierarchically from the official documents to those actually developed and used by the instructors in the classrooms. The metaphors and metonymies used in the documents construct writing as an important commodity and college writing as more valuable than writing in other places. Metaphors and metonymies stood out as important semiotic devices for instructors to stay within a given pedagogical and educational perspective in ways that may normally be largely unnoticed by them.