We live in a changing world characterized by globlization and migration (e.g. Swedish National Agency for Education 2017), where societal changes and contemporary challenges imply that issues of education today extend beyond local and national interests. In its educational goals, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that education must be conducted with respect for children, parents and linguistically: "his or her own cultural, identity and values" (UN 2001, Article 29:1). Different social changes over the last half century have created an awareness of different types of inequalities, not only related to social class, ethnicity and gendre, but also to language (Garcìa & Lin 2017).

Language skills are fundamental to a country's democracy, and the school system has a great responsibility to help students, multilingual students (Hyltenstam & Milani 2012) as well as students with Swedish as a mother tongue, to get a good reading ability, a well-developed reading comprehension and a functioning writing ability, i.e. develop different types of literacy. Nevertheless, reports on young people's language development and literacy skills show in several international surveys deteriorations since the beginning of the 2000s (Swedish National Agency for Education 2017).

In today's society, we are expected to have the ability to read and write many different kinds of texts in specific ways, and Gee (2015) points out the changing patterns that emerge in a changing society. Many researchers agree that language learning, and in particular second language learning, takes time. Learning and understanding the communicative target language can take several years under favorable circumstances, and learning a more advanced school language can take up to eight years or more (Hyltenstam et al. 2007, Collier 1987). The fact that there is an awareness within the education system of the importance of language learning in all school subjects is essential. Language development methods and language-oriented teaching are ways to put language in focus in teaching, something that proves to benefit multilingual students as well as Swedish-speakers (Hajer & Meestringa 2014, Kouns 2014, Nygård Larsson 2011, 2015). 

The literacy situation is even more complex in multilingual and multicultural contexts and Ellis (2017) argues that explicit teaching is more effective and sustainable than implicit teaching, where much is implied and taken for granted. A conscious language and literacy development approach is a way to work explicitly with language learning, where vocabulary, concepts and phrases are seen as goals in themselves (Garcìa & Li Wei 2018, Cummins 2017, Hajer & Meestringa 2014). Language learning and multilingualism with new ways of teaching and learning are important steps in todays and tomorrow's school development, in parallel with subject development and personal development (Garcia & Li Wei 2018).

The purpose of this text is to describe how one can work language-oriented with words and concepts combined with an awareness of writing purposes. The work area's classroom work culminates in a summary assignment in the economics area in civics year 8 (14 years), where students must use the work area's words and concepts and exemplify based on texts and stories used in the classroom work. With the help of the Wheel of Writing (Smidt 2008, Berge et al. 2005, 2016) writing purposes actualized in the students' concluding writing assignments are analyzed. A second issue is how didactic considerations affect that different writing purposes are actualized.

The research questions are: Which of the Wheel of Writing's writing purposes are actualized in the analyzed students’ texts? In what ways can didactic considerations and choices related to writing acts affect that different writing purposes are actualized in the students’ texts?

The Wheel of Writing has a socio-cultural and functional perspective, connected with a focus on writing acts and purposes, “and its dynamic construction captures flexible relations between these” (Berge et al. 2016, p. 172). Such a model can strengthen people's ability to become active and competent writers, support varied writing instruction, learning and assessment in different school contexts where writing is "a tool for learning, reflection, knowledge, development and interaction" (Berge et al. 2016, p. 174-175). The Wheel of Writing can “be used to develop clear understandings of which writing acts focus on knowledge relevant in a specific school subject” (Berge et al. 2016, p. 181), thus, the Wheel of Writing can be regarded as a broad and complex way of analyzing a broad and complex contexts, i.e. writing assessments in a school subject. In this part of my PhD project, texts written by 23 students in year 8, in connection with the economics section of the civics subject, are analyzed. In the analysis, all student texts were read several times, coherent information units were analyzed (one or more phrases or sentences where the information is connected) to see what writing purposes were found in these phrases. The writing purposes found in the students' texts were classified into the Wheel of Writing's six different categories for writing actions (outer circle) and writing purposes (inner circle) (Berge et al. 2005, 2015, 2016). Most acts/purposes were found in the category of exploring/knowledge development followed by describing/knowledge organization and knowledge storage, and a few times reflecting/identity creation, self-reflection, meta-communication. Advantages of this method is that the text material is authentic and the working methods in the classroom in relation to the assignment are current. The analyzed writing assignment is similar to the assignments that appear in the national tests in civics. Thus, the wheel of writing is a multifaceted analysis model, suitable for examining which writing purposes that are actualized in a writing task. The criticism expressed about the wheel of writing mainly concerns the difficulty in mapping writing acts and purposes in student texts, as these are rarely pure (Dagsland 2015, Lindh 2019). Some writing acts can have several purposes at the same time, some are in the borderland between several categories and can be difficult to classify (Lindh 2019), which can create ambiguity and be seen as a weakness (Smidt 2008).

Within the framework of this writing task, mainly two out of six writing purposes were realized. The two mainly realized writing acts and purposes were to explore/knowledge development and to describe/knowledge organization and knowledge storage, and in a few individual students’ cases to reflect/identity creation, self-reflection, meta-communication. The analyzed texts show clear differences in between the students’ texts, where three students actualize and realize three writing acts/purposes, while the other 20 students only actualize one or two. One question is whether it is desirable that many writing acts/purposes are included in the same writing task, or whether it is better to focus on a few. Another question related to this writing assignment is whether there are any differences between multilingual and Swedish-speaking students in their actualized writing purposes. Many students, multilingual as well as Swedish-speaking, need different types of support/scaffolding to develop writing purposes. In the planning of tasks, the Wheel of Writing could be useful to focus to a greater extent on different types of students’ writing and literacy development (Berge & Skar 2015). A crucial issue is whether the teacher achieves the assignment writing objectives, which leads to the most important question in all teaching and learning contexts: what do the students learn and what do they bring into the future? If teachers continuously plan the teaching and learning of writing according to the Wheel of Writing (Berge et al. 2005, 2015, 2016) they could hopefully in a conscious and structured way improve the work of actualizing, realizing, developing and strengthening the students’ writing and literacy skills. How writing and literacy purposes are actualized and realized in different types of teaching and learning, based on the Wheel of Writing and in relation to the syllabus, will be further developed in my dissertation.

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