In the last forty to fifty years, research has been performed, and dynamic discussions have taken place, in the field of mother tongue education in many countries. Limitations of the traditional content of mother tongue education have been highlighted and alternative and more extended ways of talking about teaching and learning in this area have been discussed (Dixon 1975; Cope & Kalantzis 2000; Luke & Freebody 1999; Ivanič 2004; Liberg et al 2012). Motivations for this discussion, as well as discussions concerning other school subjects, have been and still are the changes in society which lead to new demands on education and the educational system. One such demand concerns the rapidly changing media landscape in which everyone is required to successfully navigate in a flood of information expressed in texts of various types. In order to meet these challenges, children must early on in school get the opportunity to develop their ability to understand and compose meaningful written, visual, and spoken texts in different subject areas. A meta-language is also needed in order to analyze, discuss and assess aspects of form as well as of content in narrative and informational texts. However, previous research on and assessment of early reading and writing development has to a large extent focused on formal aspects of reading and writing, such as code breaking, thus excluding important discussions. Such limitations can easily lead to an underestimation or a misjudgment of a student’s literacy abilities. A wider approach in discussing and assessing early reading and writing is necessary to encourage a language development that prepares children for a changing text landscape.

 The main purpose of the study presented in this paper is therefore to further develop ways to study, understand and talk about students’ texts in early school years. More specifically, content-based aspects of informational texts are focused in order to discuss ways that students can expand their repertoire of text-making. At the same time a meta-language is developed in ways that have not previously been done for student writing in early school years. Specific research questions, that in different ways address dimensions of what the text is about, include:

• What type of content is possible to identify in students’ informational texts (in terms of e.g. dominant disciplinary claims, application to personal experiences and underlying norms and values)?
• How can the content in the texts be described in terms of participants and processes?
• How is the content mediated through macro themes and micro themes and how is the content extended?

 The theoretical framework for the study is found within a social semiotic perspective. According to Halliday (1978), the semiotic systems that we live by are considered to form a meaning resource. It is from this meaning resource that we choose when we articulate and structure meaning.  By these choices, certain aspects are put in the background or completely excluded while others are foregrounded and thereby emphasized. In this respect, the selected language forms are highly significant and colored with ideology. The social semiotic perspective provides a well-developed theoretical framework for detailed analyses of different dimensions of meaning-making in students’ texts. In order to further develop the analyses of content-based meaning making in student texts, the described theoretical framework is also combined with perspectives from curriculum studies concerning what has been discussed as different discourses of subject areas or different curriculum emphases (e.g. Ivanič 2004; Roberts & Östman 1998).

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