Developing the ability to give, receive and to process feedback is a key competence for students in higher education, both during their studies and in their future work life. In the experiential project-based course Experts in Teamwork (EiT) at NTNU, students work together in interdisciplinary teams to develop their interdisciplinary collaboration skills. One of the learning outcomes is for students to be able to give and receive feedback, as well as to reflect on the feedback individually and within their teams. The feedback should relate to patterns of action and behavior in the team and contribute to learning that promotes effective team collaboration. Student surveys indicate that feedback is essential for their learning outcomes in the course.

In EiT, various structured exercises are used to facilitate this learning. One such exercise, called 2+1, involves giving and receiving both positive and negative feedback within the team. We observed five student teams as they participated in the 2+1 exercise and interviewed them afterwards. The data consists of transcribed audio recordings of the exercise and the follow-up focus group interviews. The interviews revealed that students found giving negative feedback to be the most challenging aspect, while receiving negative feedback was less difficult. Using a detailed discourse analytical approach, we will demonstrate the communicative recourses students use to formulate and accept negative feedback, such as mitigators (e.g. “maybe” and “a little bit”), the use of pronouns (e.g. “we” and “one”), and normalizing (e.g. “of course, everyone has weaknesses”).

Upon entering higher education, students are socialized into an academic culture which is characterized by different ways of creating and expressing knowledge in written form. Considering the centrality of writing to student teachers’ disciplinary and professional development, it is crucial that the teacher educators have a language for talking about various aspects of writing in the disciplines and the teaching profession with their students.

Grounded in a sociocultural paradigm and the understanding of discourses as ways of expressing ourselves within different domains, this presentation reports on a study in which I sought to answer the following research question: What characterizes the writing-oriented language a cross-disciplinary group of teacher educators used in collegial conversations about student teachers’ academic writing? A writing-oriented language includes vocabulary and concepts that are closely associated with different dimensions of writing. To answer the research question, I analyzed eight collegial conversations in an effort to identify different features which characterized the teacher educators’ writing-oriented language.

The findings suggest that the teacher educators have knowledge about academic writing in their respective disciplines as well as in teacher education and the professional sphere. However, the findings also suggests that the writing-oriented language the teacher educators employ is rather informal and personal in tone and form. As a result, it seems that their knowledge is not always clearly formulated.

Through this exploration of the teacher educators’ writing-oriented language, this study aims to contribute more knowledge about what such a language about students’ academic writing may look like.

This study investigates how senior pre-service teachers in Greece, Norway, and Türkiye engage with and make sense of a complex classroom scenario involving multicultural and refugee-related tensions. Adopting a case-based approach, the study examines participants’ individual analyses of a hypothetical classroom conflict centered on a refugee-background student who feels socially excluded, leading to a physical altercation. The study draws on discourse-analytic methods to explore how future teachers construct, interpret, and negotiate competing perspectives within the scenario, including those of the teacher, students, and parents.
Fifty senior students (approximately 15–20 per country) participated in the study, each providing a written response reflecting on the challenges, dilemmas, and possible strategies for handling such a situation. A qualitative content analysis of their responses revealed key discursive patterns in how they conceptualize teacher-student communication, cultural sensitivity, and behavioral management. Themes such as identity and belonging, cultural misunderstandings, equity and fairness, and integration vs. exclusion emerged as central concerns in their reflections.
By examining how pre-service teachers articulate their stances, tensions, and potential solutions, this study contributes to research on teacher discourse, interactional sense-making, and intercultural communication in educational settings. The findings highlight the role of teacher education programs in preparing future educators for the linguistic, social, and ideological complexities of diverse classrooms. Additionally, the study underscores the need for further research on how contextual factors shape teachers’ interpretive frameworks when addressing multicultural challenges in education.

Authenticity is a central ideological concept in sociolinguistics (see eg. Eckert 2003; Lacoste, Leimgruber & Breyer 2014). It is also present in the study of literary representations of speech, including literary dialect. In this presentation, I will examine dialect authenticity in literary fiction from the point of view of language users. The aim is to investigate 1) how two Finnish reading groups discuss the (in)authenticity of an unconventional literary dialect representation, and 2) what these discussions reveal about the ideology of authenticity.

The data consists of video-recorded reading group meetings and hand-written participant notes. Two reading groups with varying dialectal backgrounds read one Finnish novel, in which the Far Northern dialects of Finnish are represented in a partly unconventional manner. Thematic analysis of the data reveals that the readers describe the novel’s dialect as a mix of multiple dialects, recognizing both familiar and unfamiliar linguistic features in it. However, both reading groups overlook the use of unconventional features and interpret them through the novel’s thematics, the author’s background and creativity, or the dynamic nature of language. Instead of adhering to a static ideal of authenticity, the readers view authenticity as a process and perceive dialect variation as authentic. By examining reading groups and their thoughts on literary dialect, this study represents an experimental approach to exploring language users’ ideological thinking, while also contributing to theoretical sociolinguistic discussions on authenticity.

References
Eckert, P. (2003). Elephants in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 392–397.
Lacoste, V., Leimgruber, J. & Breyer, T. (eds.). (2014). Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (linguae & litterae 39). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.