Conference Agenda

Imagine a classroom where students don’t just read and write stories—they step into, co-create, and live them. In today’s media landscape, children and young people are surrounded by multimodal texts across books, films, games, and other media, offering narratives in a variety of expressive forms (Svensson, 2022). Understanding how these transmedial text worlds can be leveraged in the classroom is key to supporting students’ boundary-crossing learning. This study contributes knowledge on how transmedial worlds, referred to as text universes in Swedish educational research, can serve as a didactic point of departure for students’ learning in literature education, with a particular focus on fiction reading.

The Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket, 2022) emphasises in the national curriculum for compulsory education that the subject of Swedish should support students’ ability to independently and collaboratively create and process texts, express themselves through varied aesthetic forms, and formulate their own opinions across different media. Students should also be given opportunities to engage in digital communication involving interactive and dynamic texts. On a European level, similar goals are highlighted in the EU’s Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning (European Union, 2018), where literacy is identified as one of eight key competences supporting personal development, social inclusion, and active citizenship. The framework also emphasises digital competence, understood as the confident and critical use of digital technologies for communication, information processing, and participation in collaborative networks. This underscores the importance of developing students’ linguistic, communicative, critical, and multimodal skills.

Meyerhofer-Parra and González-Martínez (2025) note that transmedia storytelling has increasingly been adopted as a didactic approach in education. In their systematic literature review, they conceptualize the use of transmedia storytelling in educational contexts and note the need for further research from a pedagogical perspective. These findings highlight the importance of investigating how students’ ability to read, interpret, create, and engage with literary texts through multimodal forms of expression can be enhanced in teaching practices that support both the consumption and production of multimodal narratives. At present, there is a lack of systematic literature reviews addressing text-universe-based approaches in literature education. This review, therefore, presents a synthesised overview of the use of text universes, as well as the didactic opportunities and challenges identified in previous research. The review aims to develop a nuanced understanding of how text-universe-based teaching is used in literature education and to analyse the didactic opportunities and challenges that emerge within the research field. The aim is operationalised through the following research question:
RQ1: How is the use of text universes in literature education described and conceptualised in previous research?

The study is theoretically grounded in the concept of text universes, which refers to a multimodal repertoire of texts related to the same fictional content across different textual and media formats (Lundström & Svensson, 2020). The concept is related to transmedia storytelling, which describes how narratives are developed and disseminated across multiple media (Jenkins, 2006). Svensson and Lundström (2019) use the concept to illustrate how a storyworld is realised across and within media. A text universe originates from a core text that is expanded as characters, settings, and events are transferred into other textual and media forms, creating multiple re-presentations. Svensson and Haglind (2020) describe text universes as dynamic phenomena without fixed boundaries, continuously re-created through intertextual and intermedial interpretations, and highlight several didactic advantages of working with text universes in school contexts. Against this background, there is a need for a comprehensive overview of how text-universe-based approaches to literary education have been used in previous research. This study is grounded in the above-mentioned theoretical framework and is conducted as a literature review.

Grammar skills are essential for communication, literacy, and academic success (Ennemoser et al., 2012; Ulrich, 2017). Diagnosing receptive grammar difficulties in young children is challenging, as these often remain undetected in spontaneous speech but significantly impact language comprehension (Spreer et al., 2019). Before educators can adequately and individually support key grammar competencies, these must first be assessed using standardized tools, since individual and class characteristics often influence teachers' assessment of students' academic abilities (Paleczek et al., 2017). Existing standardized instruments for assessing language comprehension in preschool and school-age children have certain limitations: (1) In German-speaking countries, there is a dearth of receptive grammar tests suitable for group use. (2) Most available tests assume prior knowledge of written language, making them unsuitable for younger children or children with reading difficulties (Lüke et al., 2016). (3) Existing grammar tests (mainly for individual test settings) use grammaticality judgement and multiple choice as prevailing task formats. If many grammatical structures are to be tested, the problem arises that a single task format is repeated up to 90 times, leading to difficulties e.g., a decrease in the child’s attention span as the test progresses (Bailey, 2016). Moreover, individual assessments are difficult to implement in everyday kindergarten and school settings, highlighting the need for group-based procedures (Lüke et al., 2016). Currently, there are few standardized group-based tools for assessing receptive grammar skills in children aged 4 to 8 that do not require literacy skills. The Grammar Skills Group Screening (GraF GruS) addresses this gap by providing educators with a practical solution.

This study aims to (a) present the development of the preliminary version of this screening for assessing receptive syntactic and morphological competencies in children aged 4 to 8 years, and (b) validate its psychometric properties. The guiding research question is: Do the various task formats of GraF GruS achieve appropriate reliability and validity? We hypothesize satisfactory internal consistency and convergent correlations with other established test instruments and teacher assessments of language skills.

GrafGrus was developed to assess grammar skills in children aged from 5 to 8, incorporating both traditional (e.g., grammatical judgment) and innovative task formats (e.g., connecting tasks, drawing symbols, and choosing symbols for noun gender). This approach enables (kindergarten) teachers to assess different aspects of syntactical and morphological receptive skills. Only when they can assess these skills, they are able to provide informed support for the children facing challenges.

Preliminary data indicate that the task formats are child-friendly and well-accepted, with satisfactory reliability observed in individual subtests. Following adaptations to specific subtests, we expect improved reliability across all subtests and satisfactory validity. GraF GruS addresses diagnostic gaps in group-based assessments of receptive grammar and provides a practical foundation for early, informed support in kindergarten and primary school settings.

Student group work has held long-accepted importance in classroom organisation and pedagogical design as contributing to learning, participation and social engagement. Internationally, state endorsed curriculum documents and policies validate group work as critical in fostering collaboration, improving communication, and building essential interpersonal skills (see e.g., Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2022; National Curriculum in England, 2013). Over decades, the study of student group activity has sought to show how learning is produced, displayed, and negotiated through social interaction (Fredriksdotter & Norén, 2023; Gillies, 2006; Mercer, 1995). Historically, classroom talk research has predominantly focused on lesson talk where the teacher, as the controlling authority, is present and central to the management of how interactions proceed. Additionally, evidence of the extent to which different interactional configurations (whole class, paired or small group) are more beneficial than others remain limited (Howe & Abedin, 2013). Less prominent in research is the examination of student-student interactional moves when engaging in small group tasks.

Examining student group talk and how it accomplishes learning sits within a broad body of research where accounts of classroom talk span numerous theoretical and methodological perspectives. For example, Christie (2005) has presented analyses of talk drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics; Edwards and Westgate (1994), Alexander (2020), and Mercer and Littleton (2007) have summarised and contrasted socio-cultural, ethnographic and linguistic approaches; and Freebody and Frieberg (2010), Koole (2010) and Macbeth (2011) have drawn on Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis (EMCA) to study how classroom talk works as mutually produced sequential courses of action. Broadly, this work illustrates how the social facets of classroom activity are collaboratively produced by teachers and students. These include what counts, moment by moment, as learning and as legitimate displays of knowledge and understanding, how classroom activities are co-managed through attention to interactional detail, how participants hold one another accountable for particular demonstrations of epistemic knowing, and how fine-grained distinctions are drawn and maintained to sustain shared understandings. According to Macbeth (2011) for example, this perspective argues that knowledge is inseparable from ongoing interactional experience, raising analytic questions concerning how ‘new knowledge’ becomes constituted through talk-in-interaction (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974).

This paper presents research capitalising on these foundational ideas focusing on how students in their group activity manage and produce learning-centred talk without teacher presence. Although researchers such as Gillies (2006), Mercer (1995), Szymanski (1999) provide seminal research outlining the importance of group work, they do not specifically address how interaction in small groups is accomplished in practice. Using EMCA, a methodological “road less travelled” in literacy research (Davidson, 2009), the paper seeks to identify the interactional resources employed by students, addressing the taken-for-granted nature of how talk works to accomplish small group activity. To do this, these main research questions are addressed:

• What interactional resources do students employ in small group activity when the teacher is not present?
• How do student-student interactions in small group discussions influence the accomplishment of group activity? and
• In what ways do student managed interactions orient to and enhance individual and collective meaning-making in small group activity?

From an ethnomethodological perspective, studying the student-talk encountered in group activity aims to provide direct access to how student participants make sense of tasks and topics, coordinate their actions, take responsibility for managing their interactions, and construct shared understandings in real time. It is expected that students use talk to propose ideas, seek clarification, challenge or build on others’ contributions, and manage participation, yet research examining this in close detail is limited. Studying interactional practices aims to reveal how epistemic knowledge, reasoning, and disciplinary understandings are collaboratively accomplished rather than simply individually held (Macbeth, 2011).