Although lectures are central to higher education, research on first-language (L1) academic listening comprehension remains limited. Drawing on Bachman and Palmer’s (2010) model of communicative language ability, this study explores factors influencing students’ comprehension of lectures delivered in their L1. Communicative language ability comprises language knowledge and strategic competence, and is influenced by attributes related to the language user. In this study, language knowledge was operationalized through general and academic vocabulary size, strategic competence through metacognitive awareness, and attributes related to the language user through educational and sociolinguistic background. The study was conducted at a university college in Flanders, Belgium, where Dutch is both the language of instruction and the predominant first language. A total of 167 students completed a listening comprehension task, vocabulary size tests, a metacognitive awareness questionnaire, and a background survey. Results showed that general and academic vocabulary were strongly associated with listening comprehension. Academic vocabulary predicted performance for lower-proficiency listeners, while general vocabulary was significant for higher groups. Metacognitive awareness was not a significant predictor overall, though potentially relevant for weaker listeners. The relatively low explained variance suggests that L1 academic listening is a multifactorial skill, influenced by linguistic, strategic, and personal factors.
The research question guiding this article reflects an aspiration to elaborate and deepen the understanding of how Michael Polanyi’s theoretical framework can enhance the integration of literature and language education. We ask: In what ways do the concepts of personal knowledge and joint meaning, as articulated by Polanyi, contribute to the enhancement of language comprehension within the context of literature education? In the pursuit of answering this question, we first aim to reveal the centrality of the use of metaphors specifically in literature and generally in the development of proficiency in spoken and written language. Secondly, the aim is to present and discuss how Paul Ricoeur's and Polanyi's phenomenologically oriented metaphor theories interlink. The third aim is to show how insight into Polanyian key concepts “personal knowledge” and “joint meaning” may help L1 / Language arts teachers to facilitate and world-orient their teaching. The latter question is explored empirically by analysing empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork of how teachers and senior college students in upper secondary Nordic classroom contexts attribute meaning to three works of literary aesthetic art: a poem, a short story and a play by the Norwegian, awarded authors Stein Mehren and Jon Fosse. Among other aspects, we find that teaching Fosse illuminates Polanyi's main point about the linkage between language and literature learning. For discussion, we argue that a Polanyian approach may help the L1 field overcome the “dyadic split” of separating language and literature in L1 teaching into completely distinct domains.
This study investigates student writers’ metalinguistic repertories in the context of L1 writing instruction in eight Danish schools. Data consists of text interviews with 48 focus students from Year 5 and Year 8, the students were interviewed about what they liked or found worked well in their own school texts. We investigate both the writerly choices the students chose to talk about and the metalanguage they used to do so. Our findings show that the students talk about the content, the structure and cohesion and about specific lexical choices in their writing, and that they most often use informal metalanguage to talk about content and lexical choices, while they use a formal metalanguage to talk about structure. More formal grammatical metalanguage is used to point to more general writing norms or teacher expectations. Our findings point to linguistic manipulations as a resource for expanding student writers’ metalinguistic repertoires. More extended metalinguistic repertoires seem to be related to (teacher perceived) writing competencies, however, we also see that specific instructional contexts seem to have the potential to expand metalinguistic repertoires, pointing to the importance of considering metalinguistic repertoires a key element in writing instruction and development.
Creative approaches to literary texts may develop students’ literary competences, but little is known about how prevalent such approaches are and how they are implemented. This study explored naturally occurring, that is non-interventionist, literature instruction in the subjects L1 Norwegian and L2 English, based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 301 video-recorded lower secondary lessons from 73 classrooms in Norway in 2015–24. By juxtaposing L1 and L2, the study recognises the importance of literature instruction across school subjects, and it advances the understanding of how literary texts are taught in L1 relating to L2. The findings indicate that creative response activities were a recurring feature in both subjects across the studied decade, although they occurred more frequently in L2 lessons. In both subjects, teachers provided opportunities for students to exercise various literary competences when responding creatively to literary texts. However, they offered little guidance on how students could undertake these activities and rarely combined them with analytical reflection that could support students’ developing literary competences. The study discusses implications for teaching and research.
This study aims to reveal how Nordic lower secondary language arts teachers motivate and describe their literature instruction. It investigates what motivations for literature instruction teachers appeal to, what literary materials they use, and by what instructional means and methods they teach literature. An online questionnaire was completed by 701 teachers from a random sample of schools across the Nordic countries. Analyses showed that teachers valued using literature for various reasons, although using literature to develop students’ reading comprehension and linguistic skills were prioritised. Across all five countries, the reading of narrative texts was favoured. However, genre preferences varied by country: contemporary short stories were significantly more frequently read in Norway, Denmark, and Finland than in Sweden and Iceland, while young adult novels were significantly more commonly read in Denmark than in the other four countries. The most common instructional practices included letting students answer text-based questions and discussing literary texts. A key finding of the study is that literature reading in Nordic schools seems to be a matter of reading instruction rather than literature instruction. Thus, while different types of skills are emphasised, less attention is given to literary reading experiences.
