Can readings in class of a children’s book that a majority of children and youngsters love form the basis of a series of writing exercises that together help to improve as well the pupils’ understanding of grammar as their general language proficiency? According to the competence aims in the English subject curriculum Norwegian pupils are expected to “read /…/ a representative selection of literary texts from the genres /…/ novels /…/from the English-speaking world” (Culture, society and literature), to “use basic grammatical and text structures of English /…/ in writing” (Communication) as well as to “use basic terminology to describe grammar and text structure” (Language learning). Can these three different aims be focused on simultaneously?

Experiences from my own teaching practice in the past four weeks, when I actively and frequently have engaged Roald Dahl’s children’s book”Mathilda” challenge the notion that the aims necessarily have to be incorporated in separate learning activities. The pupils that I teach are 15 years old and when I first met them I asked them what relationship they had to “Mathilda”. A majority of the pupils either had read the book or watched the filmatisation from 1997 and developed a fondness with the story. This familiarity was the foremost reason why I chose this particular piece of story writing for this classroom activity. To use a material that many children and youngsters believe is fun when one also has to touch upon grammatical structures and work with language proficiency, which many pupils believe is less fun, is paramount I think.

In every teaching session I have read out two pages from the book and asked the pupils to either summarise or make a personal comment upon this short extract. I asked the pupils to limit their writing to one sentence only and make the most possible use of subjunctions and conjunctions in their sentences. When I first read something the pupils had written (prior to my own project began) I detected lots of common mistakes in their writing. “Common problems for Norwegian learners are word order and mistakes connected to the verb system, especially concord, the use of the continous tenses and irregular verb forms” (Drew & Sorheim 2010:98). This description holds very true for my student body as well.

My question is:can long term exposure to the content of a popular children’s book help to change any of these patterns (especially word order), if the pupils are asked to respond in writing at the end of each reading session? A substantial part of my lessons have been devoted to a practical experiment in order to find out more about this question.

So far (at the end of week five) I can not tell with certainty whether there is a connection between listening comprehension, writing and grammatical competence in the sense that my lection plans are beneficial for all the competence aims mentioned above. There are nevertheless some important preliminary findings that I would like to share with you. The pupils have cooperated very well in this small research project, which of course is very important. It has to be mentioned that I have promised a small gift for the winner in this competition (a DVD-copy of the filmatisation from 1997). I have also tried to stimulate the students by reading out loud sentences in class that I find particularly good (without revealing the identity of the author to the class). So far I am convinced this practice has made the pupils more willing to participate in my experiment. In most students’ writing it is also easy to detect a progression when it comes to word order in complex sentences.