Film i skolan - vita duken som vita tavlan : En komparativ studie om högstadieelevers perception av film och litteratur, utifrån informella och examinerande samtal i svenskundervisningen

Sammanfattning: In today’s Swedish classroom, film is used as a class guard, reward or a comparison to literature rather than a didactic tool. Although film is present in most students’ everyday life, literature is still seen as the highest form of fiction. As a result of the conflict between high culture and popular culture, the film’s potential as a language developer and eye opener isn’t utilized. In other words, film is reduced to a bird of the week, until “real” fiction comes along.  The main aim of this undergraduate thesis was to examine how students in lower secondary school interpret literature and film.  This was achieved by analysing four text-talks where four students discuss a novel and a film. The study examined the text movability in order to find out how the students understand the plot, make inferences, and if they express their thoughts in a rational or in an irrational way.  The result showed that the structure of the discussion and the question formulation affected the students’ interpretations of the novel and the film. In this aspect, this essay confirmed the results from previous studies that question formulation is an important didactic tool. The results of this essay indicate that a student with sufficient literacy skills, i.e., a student who has the ability to decode and produce different types of texts within the school context, would manage to decode a discussion context and to keep a distance to the text. A student with unsufficient literacy skills, on the other hand, would not have the ability to decode discussions and text in the same manner.  This study is a contribution to the investigations within the field of reading comprehension where film is used as a complement to literature when teaching Swedish.