The main objective and theoretical framework

The aim of this study is to explore what difficulties and possibilities second language (L2) students in grade nine perceive when reading texts in civics. In civic education, the reading of texts in textbooks is crucial, and it is reasonable to think that the students’ possibilities to understand the content of the texts play a role for their learning in civics. However, knowledge about the possibilities and difficulties for the students’ meaning-making needs to include not only linguistic aspects of the reading but also perspectives of the role of students’ prior knowledge when they face texts in civics. This knowledge is important to develop, to be able to work scaffolding in the classroom when civics is taught.

In fact, when L2 students’ challenges in civics classrooms are discussed, students’ level of prior knowledge and literacy abilities are pointed out as two factors that matter for L2 students’ goal achievement in civics (Lai, 2018; Gibson, 2017; Deltac, 2012). In addition, studies which underline the importance of prior knowledge for content learning also emphasize that this type of knowledge needs to be assessed and activated in order to support students’ content area learning (Jaffee, 2016; Vacca, Vacca & Mraz, 2014).

Regarding literacy abilities, their role in content area learning has been studied from various perspectives. For instance, from a form-focused perspective, the language forms and structures in the texts are studied in order to facilitate L2 students with language barriers, such as difficulties with reading comprehension due to complex sentences, dense content, and understanding of the content-specific concepts (Schleppegrell, 2012; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012). With a form-focused perspective, there is a risk of students using literacy abilities without having a comprehensive understanding of the purpose of a text and how to read it (Moje, 2015).

In order to integrate the form with the content, content-focused activities are suggested by scholars within the field of disciplinary literacy, who claim that the tasks in content area classrooms should be designed to support both language and content area learning (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2017; Yoder, Kibler & van Hover, 2016; de Schonewise & Klinger, 2012).

With support from the previous research, I have developed a four-field model to demonstrate that the four key components of a) literacy abilities, b) disciplinary literacy abilities, c) prior knowledge, d) content area knowledge, and their interaction with each other are central for supporting L2 students’ civics acquisition and literacy development. The alphabetical designators a, b, c, and d in the model do not indicate any linear order between the four components. These four components are each placed in a box and I have drawn two-headed arrows to connect them to each other to illustrate the interaction between them, as all four components need to function together in order to support L2 students’ literacy development and civics learning.

In this study, the four-field model is used as an analytical tool and conceptual framework for analyzing the difficulties and possibilities that L2 students perceive and express when they read texts in civics. Thus, it makes sense to ask the following research question:

• What do L2 students themselves consider to be of importance for understanding the content of civics, through texts in textbooks that are used in civic education?

Methods and design of the study The data is based on thirty-six Think Aloud (TA) conversations about two textbook texts in civics with eighteen L2 students in grade nine, aged 14-15. The participants are nine girls and nine boys from three different schools, situated in two different municipalities in Sweden, each representing low, middle, and high socioeconomic status in regard to the parents’ educational background. Eleven of the participants are born in Sweden and have acquired Swedish as their L2 during early childhood, whereas seven participants acquired Swedish as their L2 after migration to Sweden. The duration of the residency time in Sweden varies between two and ten years. The participants speak Persian, Dari, Portuguese, Arabic, Tagalog, Somali, Portuguese, Thai, Albanian and Spanish, in addition to English and Swedish. In order to create a variation in the set of data, teachers in civics were asked to select students who represent low, middle, and high grades in civics at grade nine. The researcher deliberately chose not to be notified of the participants’ grades. TA is a method in which participants are instructed to verbalize their thoughts as they occur in their immediate short-term memory when performing a prepared task (Duncker, 1926). In addition, retrospective TA (reflection-on-action, i.e. reflective thoughts verbalized after the task completion) facilitates the collection of rich and meaningful data. The data includes all thoughts that are spoken out loud during completion of an assigned task (Burbach, Barnason & Thompson, 2015, Ericsson & Simon, 1998). In this study, each TA-session is allocated to three coherent steps where participants are asked to: (a) read and think aloud about two civics texts with democracy as the main theme, (b) summarize the texts in their own words, and (c) respond to semi-structured interview questions (Exit interviews). The Exit interviews account for the retrospective data and provide the researcher with the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the participants' comprehension of the texts and the difficulties that they verbalize. Each TA-session is conducted with one student at the time and took approximately 60 minutes, including the necessary preparations. The TA-sessions are audio-recorded and transcribed for further analysis. The participants had access to the texts (two A4 pages) during the entire session and the texts were not read by them beforehand.

Preliminary results The findings illustrate that eighteen participants recognize that all four components: literacy abilities, disciplinary literacy abilities, prior knowledge, and content area knowledge (the four-field model) are needed when reading and understanding the civics texts. However, sixteen out of eighteen students point out literacy abilities and prior knowledge as the most important requirements for reading and understanding the civics texts. To make a distinction between literacy abilities and disciplinary literacy abilities appears to be difficult to all participants, but they acknowledge the correlation between them. One possible explanation could be that while identifying the civics-specific terms is relatively easy, since they are bolded in the texts, recognizing the content-specific language of the texts appears to be challenging and L2 students request teachers’ support with it. In addition, the majority of the students state that they seldom benefit from the civics texts in their own writing and oral language production, but that they expand their vocabulary by reading the texts. Furthermore, the participants’ reported difficulties mainly are related to: (a) high degree of new vocabularies, including both civics-specific terms and everyday words (b) dense content, (c) long text passages, (d) few or hidden clues, (e) ambiguous pictures, and (f) insufficient prior knowledge about the main topic. Finally, the following resources are raised by L2 students as meaningful for their understanding of the texts in civics: previous civics knowledge, civic teachers’ explanations, knowledge acquired from other school subjects (e.g. subjects history and Swedish), classroom discussions, and discussions at home. In my presentation, I will focus on the interplay between the four components (the four-field model) and explain how knowledge about this interplay contributes to a better understanding of L2 students’ language and content-related needs in civics classrooms.

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