Concepts of literature in Danish L1-textbooks and their framing of students' reading

Abstract

This article focuses on concepts of literature, reader and literary reading in five Danish textbooks for lower secondary school from the period 1983-2008. The bases, priorities and orientations of the text-books are studied by the use of Langer's five stances for envisionment building (Langer, 2011), and Witte & Sâmihaian's model of paradigms in literature teaching (Witte & Sâmihaian, 2013). On this basis, the article analyses the aims, approaches, text selection and the reader stances intended in the tasks and assignments of the textbooks. The aim of the article is to present an analysis of the learning designs of the textbooks in order to discuss how the different designs may frame students' encounters with literature, and how they link to paradigms in literature teaching and to current discussions about text and/or reader orientation within literature teaching.