This paper presents a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews investigating 1) How teachers in the course English 6 interpret the terms "relatively varied" and "well-grounded and balanced", and how their interpretations differed, 2) How do the teachers interpret the terms in relations to the National Agency for Education’s commentary material?, and 3) What kind of resources do the teachers use to understand those terms? The reason for conducting this research is to gain a greater understanding of how teachers in the course English 6 in upper secondary school interpret the terms in the requirements. The terms in our requirements leave a lot of room for interpretations, and I want to find out how teachers with experiences of teaching interpret the terms in order to better understand how they can be interpret.

My finding revealed that three out of four of the interviewed teachers did not mention the terms in their description of them, they brought in other aspects from the requirements, and did not address neither of the terms clearly. This applied to all the teachers, except for T4. The teacher that did address the terms was the only one who read the National Agency’s commentary material, therefore T4’s interpretations of the term aligned closest to the description in the commentary material.

From the answers the teachers provided me with, they seemed to interpret the requirements in their own way and this is a validity and reliability issue when assessing the students’ texts. The teachers answers are also discussed from a norm-referenced perspective.