Mid Sweden University

This study compares three different writing conditions – pen and paper, tablet, and tablet with access to speech synthesis – within a class of fourth graders in Sweden. The aim was to examine if these different conditions for writing had any impact on students’ creation of narrative text. The empirical data consists of students’ texts, composed under these three conditions, completed with data from participant observations. The theoretical model, the Wheel of Writing, in combination with a process analysis described in Systemic Functional Linguistics, served as a basis for analysis of the texts. Observations were analysed using content analysis. Findings presented in this article are partly in line with previous research. Speech synthesis seemed to play a crucial role in improving students’ writing. The texts were affected in terms of increased text length, spelling, structure, and content when using digital resources. These results were most obvious for students with Swedish as their sec- ond language. One core finding, which was true for most students, was that processes describing action verbs increased when students wrote digitally. Contradicting this, when students wrote by hand they used more processes, describing feelings and verbal processes.

Along with digital development, new possibilities for communicating have emerged. The younger generation has adopted these new possibilities to a great extent. In order to be able to utilise the opportunities offered by digital tools when writing, access to digital tools is essential. Schools need to develop a writing education that meets students’ contemporary writing needs. In considering this, it is important to learn more about the gains and the losses in digital writing. The purpose of this study was to understand and discuss the relation between students’ digital access, students’ per- ceived affordances with digital writing, and student agency. The methods used were a statistical survey and qualitative interviews. Six classes from five different schools located in a municipality in the middle of Sweden were chosen as an informant group. The results indicate that the most common condition concerning students’ digital access was that students shared digital tools for writing with their families. An analysis of affordances was carried out to interpret the empirical findings from the qualitative data. Affordances that emerged were: write-ability, edit-ability, story-telling ability and accessibility. In addition, the ways in which digital access and the affordances per- ceived can be related to student agency were analysed. The main conclusion was that given the conditions of digital access and opportunities to practice, the affordances of digital writing can increase student agency. In turn, this suggests that writing education that focuses on student agency can contribute to equity in writing activities.

The young generation are both consumers and producers of digital multimodal texts and can thus be seen as cocreators of the culture and the contexts that they are part of. Learning more about how students create multimodal texts and what students’ texts are about can extend the understanding of contemporary meaning making. This study examines 23 Swedish fifth-grade students’ multimodal digital stories in a school context. The aim of this research was to understand the meaning that the students made in their digital narratives and to describe how they made that meaning. This study’s multimodal textual analysis is based on the multiliteracies perspective. The results indicate that all of the students, to varying degrees, took advantage of the available digital and modal resources. Some students chose writing as their sole mode, but others used all of the available resources. Furthermore, the results revealed that students’ popular culture experiences influenced many of their texts, which can indicate that popular culture texts are used as resources for making meaning about the world.