Language care for language development. Language, language norms, and pupils’ language from an educational perspective

The Swedish classroom of today displays linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. Hence, if a teacher is to be able to assist each pupil in a language development regarding the elaborated language as well as the private, a new kind of work with language care and deeper knowledge of language norms are required. Furthermore, the elaborated language is consistently changing as a result of the logic of change of post-modernism. Through interviews with and texts written by students studying to become teachers, the article aims at investigating how the students read and relate to texts written by pupils. The article, the result of a pilot study in a major research project, shows that the students, although almost graduated, solely focus on evaluation of the pupils' texts. Accordingly, they have not appropriated the practice of reading the texts in order to contribute to the pupils' language development. The two main reasons for this seem to be the students' own school experiences, and non-appropriated knowledge from their present education. The students' way of reading texts written by pupils must reflect the changing of the official, elaborated language as well as the linguistic inconsistencies of the pupils. This, in turn, requires a teacher who works with the language of the pupils in a differentiated way and also requires an elaboration and an expansion of the meaning of language development. The article presents some examples of the latter.