This article examines Swedish civics teachers' perspectives on difficulties and opportunities that their second-language (L2) students encounter when reading textbook texts in civics. The study is based on individual semi-structured interviews with teachers in Grade 9. Civics teachers report uncertainty about identifying the source of difficulties…

Learning vocabulary is a central but yet complex aspect of learning a language. Hence, researchers stress the importance of facilitating vocabulary development via a structured approach to target words and recycling. While teaching materials have the potential to provide this structure to all students in a classroom, few studies have investigated…

One core aspect of learning a language is developing vocabulary, an endeavor that requires a structured and principled focus in the classroom. As the EFL textbook has a central position in the language learning classroom, it should have an important role to play in structuring vocabulary development. Yet, what guides decisions concerning the…

Exploring how the information flow of social studies textbook spreads is negotiated in teacher-led interaction, the concern of this study is the conscious and critical use of teaching material in diverse student groups. The study involved a teacher and her Grade 6 students in a school with many migrant language learners. The data was gathered by…

Formulaic language is notoriously difficult for second language learners of French to master (Edmonds, 2014; Forsberg, 2010). Yet, no study has examined formulaic language in French textbooks despite the fact that in many contexts, textbooks represent a significant proportion of the input that learners receive. The current study addresses this…

In this article we examine a teacher's and multilingual students' use of multiple resources and their potential for students' meaning-making of sound and sound transmission. Students were 14-15 years old, Swedish grade 8, speaking Swedish as a second language. We examine how different strategies and multiple resources interact in creating thematic…

This article analyses the teaching of Swedish language lecturers active in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows the centrality of literature and literary constructions and analyses images of Swedishness and the Swedish nation present in the teaching material of that time in relation to the national image present in…

This article reports on a survey of Swedish EFL teachers' attitudes towards, and dependence on, ELT coursebook packages in the light of recent research into digital literacy. The results showed that while ICT is making massive inroads into language classrooms in technologically advantaged countries like Sweden, the coursebook package still has its…

This article reports the findings of a comparative analysis of two English teaching course book series which are widely used in school years 4-6 in Sweden: Good Stuff and New Champion. The analysis comprises comparisons of the vocabulary component in the teaching materials and examines the extent to which words -- adjectives, nouns and verbs --…

Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities…

Children of foreign origin are increasingly failing in mathematics in Swedish compulsory schools. This article analyses the didactics at a school proven very successful in teaching mathematics to all children including the 70% of children of foreign origin. The situation at the studied school is compared to research of the Swedish school system…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to…

The development of a method is described for the automatic ordering of texts based on the richness of their vocabularies. It further involves the specification of a basic vocabulary and of a gradual enlargement of this basic vocabulary linked to the study of the texts in the given order. (Author/RM)