This chapter has so far been concerned with official curriculum documents, but other factors also influence which literature is used in the classroom. This section addresses the two most important of these: examinations and textbooks.27 Both may influence teachers in their choices of texts, as examinations and textbooks interpret the broad aims of the curriculum – although in different manners. In what follows, I briefly discuss what characterizes literature’s role in contemporary examinations and textbooks. I focus especially on the compulsory English subject in upper secondary school.
27 Other relevant factors include the selection of literature available in the school library, including class sets of
3.2.1 Examinations
Today, all students taking the compulsory and elective courses in English may be selected for both written and oral examinations.28 The written examinations are
designed by committees appointed by the Directorate for Education and Training (Udir, 2017). All students across the country taking a specific course in a given school term take the same written examination, and English teachers across the country serve as examiners of the coded, anonymous responses. In the compulsory course, the written examination includes a preparation booklet which students are provided with the day before the examination, which allows them to prepare for the issues that will be addressed in the examination itself. In the elective courses, there is no preparation part in advance of the examination, but since written examinations used in preceding years are available on the Directorate’s website, teachers may use these to help students prepare (Udir, 2019b).
Unlike the written examinations, the oral examinations are designed locally; the county authorities are in charge of them, but they may delegate the responsibility to the individual schools. Usually, the teacher who has taught the students designs the examination tasks, and s/he is also part of the examination along with an external examiner. On the day before the oral examination, students are provided with a topic which they have to present at the examination. After the student’s presentation, the examiners can ask them about other issues relating to the course’s competence aims (Udir, 2019d). Since the oral examinations are designed and organized locally, it is fair to assume that they may vary in terms of what they focus on, and how much emphasis literature is given. A recent study distinguished between “content” and “oral competence” (the competence aims dealing with literature were seen to belong to “content”) in the assessment of oral examinations in the compulsory subject and found that teachers varied greatly in how they weighted these two components (Bøhn, 2016).
28 In the Norwegian educational system, students do not have examinations in all their school subjects. In the
spring of Vg3 (Vg2 for vocational students), students are selected for written examinations and oral examinations in a selection of the subjects they are studying – the number of which can vary depending on their study program. In Vg1 and Vg2, students may be selected for either one written or one oral exam. (See Udir, 2018b for more.)
Due to the lack of data with regard to literature’s role in oral examinations, I will focus on written examinations in the discussion that follows.
I have looked at all the written examinations in the compulsory course, Vg2 International English, Vg3 Social Studies English, and Vg3 English Literature and Culture from 2016, 2017, and 2018 that were available on the Directorate’s website in the early fall of 2018 (Udir, 2019b). Vg3 English Literature and Culture stands out as being more literature-centered than the others, which is natural, considering the course’s name and focus. In the other three courses, literature plays a more peripheral part in the examinations. Because English Literature and Culture is the least taught of all the English courses in upper secondary school, and because the same tendencies can be seen in the examinations for the compulsory course, Vg2 International English, and Vg3 Social Studies English, I focus on the latter three courses here. The examples below are taken from examinations in the compulsory course.
In the written examination, literature is one of several elements that students can choose to write about. In the compulsory course, the preparation booklet for the examination may include literary texts to help students prepare for the given topic. For the fall 2016 examination, students read an excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932); before the spring 2017 examination, they encountered song lyrics by Buffy Sainte- Marie (b. 1941) and an excerpt from Nick Hornby’s novel How to be Good (2001); before the spring 2018 examination, they read an excerpt from Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011) – all twentieth or twenty-first century texts. However, literature is not always part of the preparation material; as students prepared for the spring 2016 examination, a brief text about the author Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was the closest they got to literary texts in the booklet they were provided with. This lack of focus on literature was reflected in the examination tasks that year, with only one out of six being related to literature (students had to respond to two out of the six tasks). Furthermore, this task was quite broad, allowing students to choose which texts (or films) they wanted to discuss:
Literary characters often choose to violate social norms or break laws, often for very good reasons. Create a text in which you compare two such characters and discuss the
choices they make. The characters must be from English-language novels, films, plays or short stories you have studied. Give your text a suitable title. (Udir, 2019b.)
In other examinations, however, the literary texts used in the preparation booklet were referred to directly in tasks; this was the case with both the excerpt from the Hornby novel and the excerpt from the Roth novel. Nevertheless, as students could always choose another task which did not require them to address literary texts, students did not have to write about literature in any of them. The latter was also the case in the examinations in Vg2 International English and Vg3 Social Studies English: even though literary texts and/or films were usually included in the examinations, it was always possible for students to choose not to respond to the literary tasks.
There are two main consequences to this kind of written examination. Firstly, since it is possible to earn an excellent grade without discussing literature at all, this could indicate to both teachers and students that literature is a less central part of the subject. Secondly, the preparation booklet and the examination tasks could be viewed as the ultimate interpretation of the competence aims, meaning that the texts used here could be seen as “approved” by the educational authorities. This appears to be the case in the lower and upper secondary schools examined in a study conducted after the implementation of LK-06; it found that the teaching of English was strongly influenced by the examinations (Sandvik & Buland, 2013). This is referred to as a “backwash” effect: “the curriculum’s competence aims are viewed as less important than the national guidelines for assessment” (Sandvik & Buland, 2013, p. 122, my translation). When it comes to literature, this means that teachers prioritize literature in general and specific texts in particular not in accordance with the competence aims, but in accordance with the examinations. However, the study also found that the backwash effect of examinations on teaching was stronger in lower secondary than in upper secondary school; teachers in Vg1 included all central skills and competences mentioned in the curriculum – even those not tested directly in examinations (p. 124). Nevertheless, the backwash effect is present in teachers’ practices, and can be seen to be a negative version of the competence agenda. Rather than focusing on the overall competences that students are to achieve, teachers influenced by backwash focus on the examinations’ assessment criteria in their teaching.
3.2.2 Textbooks
Another important resource that influences which texts teachers use in the classroom is the textbook. Although teachers may use any resources they wish to meet the aims of the curriculum, research shows that textbooks are central to English teachers’ practices in Norway (A. S. Bakken, 2018; Eikrem, 2006; Ø. Gilje et al., 2016; Ibsen & Hellekjær, 2003; Juuhl et al., 2010). The textbooks are usually written by teachers and/or scholars working with teacher training programs in college and universities, and schools may choose freely which textbooks available on the market that they wish to use. Most schools have class sets of textbooks for their students, and this practice ensures that all students have the same written materials available at all times. However, English teachers in primary and lower secondary use textbooks more than teachers in upper secondary schools; in a recent study, less than 40% of upper secondary teachers reported that the printed textbook was their primary teaching resource (Ø. Gilje et al., 2016, p. 51). According to the same study, digital resources are more used in upper secondary than in primary and lower secondary schools, where the printed textbook has a stronger standing (p. 24). The study also confirmed that textbooks are chosen by teams of teachers at the individual schools, and that the teachers’ level of autonomy in this area is slightly higher in upper secondary than in primary and lower secondary schools (p. 18).
Although printed textbooks are viewed as less important in upper secondary school today, they still have a place; textbooks are used as a point of departure, often deciding which topics to teach and the order in which these topics are addressed (Ø. Gilje et al., 2016; Munden & Sandhaug, 2017). Although LK-06 does not mention any particular English-speaking countries, cultures, or literary texts and traditions as required knowledge bases in the compulsory English course, some of the textbooks organize their content according to geography, with a special focus on the USA and Great Britain (or North America and the British Isles). Examples include Tracks SF (Sjøvoll, Moen, Murray, & Fodnestøl, 2016) and Targets (Balsvik, Bratberg, Pihlstrøm, Kagge, & Henry, 2015) for Vg1 general studies, and Tracks: Engelsk for yrkesfag (Burgess, Fuhre, Moen, Murray, & Sjøvoll, 2013) for vocational studies. NDLA, the national
digital learning arena which offers online resources for the upper secondary level,29
organizes topics about culture and society geographically in what appears to be their perceived order of importance (considering the amount of sub-categories, texts and tasks available for each topic). They begin with the USA, continue with the UK and Ireland, progress to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and conclude with the last geographical category called “other countries”, which includes selected African and Asian countries (Gundersen & Frønsdal, 2018). Other textbooks, however, organize their content according to topics and issues rather than focusing on geography; examples include the textbook series Skills for vocational studies which is found in several editions, one for each vocational study program (see for example Lokøy, Lundgren, Langseth, & Hellesøy, 2013a), and the Vg1 general studies book Access to English (Burgess & Sørhus, 2013). This differing organization may influence which literary texts are selected, as a chapter dealing with one geographical region is more likely to include texts originating only from that area, and a chapter organized according to a topic will include texts that relate to this topic rather than texts that originate in a certain place.
In terms of the selection of specific literary texts, different textbooks for the compulsory course present a variety of works, but some texts and authors nevertheless appear in several. The strong position which textbooks hold in Norwegian schools (Ø. Gilje et al., 2016) might indicate that the literature present in textbooks is probably in widespread use.30