The aim of this thesis is to provide new knowledge about the design of explicit story teaching in early primary school. It focuses on graphical models and metalanguage of the school subject Swedish, using a socialsemiotic framework of Design for Learning, genre theory, and concepts relating to interaction in formalteaching contexts. The study examines the social dimensions of making story elements explicit and functional in grade 1 and grade 2 classroom practices through a micro-analytical approach. The research spans from the contextualizing arena of policy documents and teaching resources to the education–practicalarena of teacher and student practical interactions in formal teaching. The central concept is story teaching design, which involves using graphical models and subject-specific metalanguage. It explores how teaching resources and teachers’ orchestrations of these resources can guide students’ engagement with story elements in a formal teaching context. The data consists of curricula for early teaching of Swedish pertaining to stories, incorporating written, drawn, and embodied modes of teachers. The collection focuses on video and multimodal analyses, audio recordings, and the collection of students’ writing processes and products.

The project contributes new metadiscursive insights into the orchestrated modes used in designing story teaching in early primary school. The main findings indicate that the orchestrated graphical models focus mainly on story elements at a global text level and vary in focus of particular story elements. Teachers’ orchestrations can focus on either story-specific elements or general narrative traits, framing the reconstructing negotiations of a story with either a goal-oriented or a more explorative approach. Students tend to re-design teaching resources to build tension in their own written stories by re-designing characterdialogue to realize several narrative functions. Teachers’ use of metalanguage, such as “red thread” and “descriptions,” in story teaching creates broad text expectations for written stories, extending beyond the global text level. These concepts are also prevalent in feedback on student texts. The findings underscore the value of an intermodal perspective to understand teachers’ efforts to make explicit knowledge about stories accessible for students, since they combine orchestrated modes to highlight the same story element.