Writing in English in Norwegian Teachers’ Education

In recent years, Norwegian authorities have emphasized the need to develop primary and secondary pupils’ "basic skills" at all levels and in all subjects. Writing is central here, next to numeracy, being able to read, to express oneself orally and to use digital tools. The National Curriculum for Norwegian primary and secondary school refers to writing not only as a skill that needs to be mastered, but also as a tool that can be used for learning in a variety of different situations. Thus, teacher students of English must learn to deal with different aspects of writing in their future classrooms. They are also required to have good command of written English themselves, and to be well acquainted with relevant text norms and genre conventions. This presentation discusses how the new teacher training programme in Norway (from 2010) caters for the development of these competences. The study refers to notions of academic literacy (Bazerman, Little et al. 2005) and text culture (Tønnesson 2012) and aims to describe the characteristics of the text culture(s) that Norwegian students of English are expected to master as part of their teacher training. These characteristics are then discussed in relation to the challenges related to writing that the students will face as teachers of English in the future. The study is based on an investigation of curricular documents, nationally and locally, and the students’ obligatory written assignments. Data have been collected from the thirteen colleges in Norway that offer English as an elective during them first two years of the four year programme.