In this study, we investigated audience awareness characteristics in elementary school students’ texts. To achieve this goal, we used a cross-sectional study design and sampled texts from 90 students in grades 1–3 (N = 270). These texts formed a corpus that was qualitatively analyzed by the research team. We used descriptive statistics to identify audience awareness patterns. Based on previous research, we expected to find considerable variation within and between grades. Therefore, we posed the following two research questions: (1) What characterizes audience awareness within grades 1–3? and (2) How does audience awareness develop between grades 1–3? We found that students used various rhetorical moves oriented toward the audience, such as greetings and closings, meta-text, explanations, and justifications. The results indicated that the students exhibited several characteristics related to audience awareness in all three grades. However, the variation within the grades was significant, while the variation between the grades was less pronounced.

[Open Access CC BY-NC-ND]This article addresses the basis for the development of the screening tool Norwegian Early Writers Signal (NEWS). The aim of the study was to develop a tool for teachers in grades 1–3 to identify student texts in ‘the Warning Zone’, i.e., texts that signal insufficient overall text quality associated with students in need of extra instructional support. Text norms were elicited from a panel of 14 experts in a standardsetting seminar. The standard-setting procedure was a benchmarking-like approach in which panelists chose texts that according to their judgement were in the Warning Zone. Additionally, in an online questionnaire, data on experts’ expectation growth pattern for eight text quality aspects in grades 1–3 were collected. Furthermore, student texts in the Warning Zone were marked and then included in the screening tool to concretize the norms, showing that texts in this zone can take several shapes. The article discusses what steps can be taken to further validate and implement the NEWS tool.

Recent decades have seen a shift regarding ideas of and approaches to literacy. One example is that the individual-psychological perspective focusing primarily on specific writing skills that used to be predominant has been extended and complemented by functional, social semiotic, and sociocultural perspectives where the interaction between the individual's use of language resources and the social, cultural, and historical contexts is in focus (e.g., Furthermore, issues of writing instruction and research have, in recent years, received far more attention than before, which can be noted by the publication of handbooks of writing research (MacArthur et al., 2016), writing development (Beard et al., 2009), writing instruction (Graham et al., 2019), and reviews of writing research

Scandinavian writing research forms a relatively new field, with an increased number of studies conducted in the last two decades. In this qualitative synthesis review of 87 peer reviewed journal articles from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden published between 2010 and 2020, the aim was to outline the landscape of current educational writing research from the region. The sample included research articles published in both Scandinavian and international journals. Our analysis focused on the articles’ research approaches and main themes regarding the object of investigation. The main themes identified were Writing Instruction, Writing Assessment, and Students’ Text. We found a predominance of studies conducted in the context of language arts/first language (L1) education, concerning either disciplinary or general aspects of writing. We also found a predominance of approaches based on either sociocultural or social semiotic theory. Furthermore, a majority of the reviewed studies were explorative and small-scale, and, for the Writing Assessment studies in particular, directed at the secondary stages of school. The results suggest a call for future studies focusing on writing interventions and studies deploying a wide range of methodological approaches, as well as studies based on inter-Scandinavian collaborations across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.