A Shift from Spectator to Creator: A Study of Blog Writing in a Print and Photo High School Class

Abstract

This article is a study of written blog texts from 12 third grade high school students produced during the course of one school year, commenting on their own photos and artwork as part of their curriculum in the discipline Print and Photo. Analysis of the texts show that there is a clear tendency to reduce the constructions with forms of to be from the beginning towards the end of the school year, whereas constructions with forms of to have increase in the same time span. This is detailed by analyzing one of the students’ texts, finding a shift from predominantly descriptive accounts of the images to using language to positioning themselves as active participants with focus on the process of composition. Examining the distribution of abstract versus concrete nouns in the same texts shows that the frequency of abstracts nouns stays the same whereas there is a reduced frequency of concrete nouns during the school year. These findings suggest a development in language into a particular kind of abstraction where their photos are increasingly discussed in terms of how they compose the images rather than describing the elements that are in the photos – a development resembling a shift in position from spectators to creators.