What learning materials reveal about Danish L1 as a school subject. Background, methods and results from a collaborative mixed methods study on learning materials in Danish L1 education

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to give a general presentation of a collaborative mixed methods study on pedagogical learning materials that teachers report using in L1 teaching in primary and lower secondary school in Denmark. The presentation consists of four parts: an introduction covering the background for conducting this mixed methods study, including a contextualisation to support non-Danish readers in understanding the study, a brief description of other Nordic and international research on learning materials, a methodological section describing the mixed methods approach as an explanatory sequential design study, and, finally, a presentation and discussion of the main results of both the quantitative and the qualitative studies presented in this special issue. We conclude that the learning materials for Danish L1 generally have a formalistic approach to the subject matter, dominated by skills-based tasks, and that they are characterised by narrow text choices and decontextualised tasks. None of this is in accordance with the National Curriculum for Danish L1 in primary and lower secondary school.