Vocational education and training (VET) programs in Sweden blend classroom instruction and internships, while coding bootcamps offer accelerated adult education in computer science. These institutions increasingly teach in English, mirroring the shift towards English-medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education. Consequently, most EMI scholarship…

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…

International mobility has caused a need for language education where adults can learn the language(s) used in their new country. In Sweden, the language programme SFI (Swedish for immigrants) provides basic second language education for adult immigrants. For those learners who are not yet functionally literate, basic literacy education is…

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four…

This contribution explores how subject positions and perspectives are negotiated in the discursive practices of teaching social studies. The study involved a teacher and a group of second-language learners in Grade 6, the data being gathered by observations, voice recordings, and collection of teaching materials throughout seven weeks. The…

Demotivation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011) and non-participation (Norton, 2001) characterize negative responses to classroom practice of a generally chronic nature. In this article, focus is directed to negativity that emerges within the context of a particular language developing activity, and which can be understood as a situated response to the…

Sami are Indigenous languages spoken by the Sami people in the northern parts of Scandinavia and Russia. All Sami languages are endangered because of historically aggressive assimilation policies. Currently Sami communities are working actively with language revitalisation processes. This article examines pupils' access to knowledge in and about…

Drawing from an ethnographic project on the subject of "Swedish as a second language" (SSL) in three linguistically diverse upper secondary schools, the aim of this study was to investigate how three SSL teachers, one from each school, discursively constructed SSL, and whether and how they legitimated their role as SSL teachers, in…

This paper reports on a task-based language teaching course in Second Life. The data set consists of transcribed recordings and a teacher interview. Focusing on how the teacher facilitated student participation, this paper aims to explore the discourse functions in the teacher language output and then to address the teacher roles in three…

The Swedish educational policy for upper secondary English, which took effect in 2011 and adopts a globalised perspective on language, is explored with respect to how skills and awareness related to local, national, and international roles of English are represented in policy documents. A discourse analytic approach to language policy is used to…

This paper reports on a study which explores how routine activities in preschool can support young multilingual children's participation, communication and development of languages. The paper takes as its starting point the idea that young children's development takes place through interaction and participation, including in routine activities.…

In this paper, we consider a student error produced in a French foreign language small-group seminar, involving four Swedish L1 first-term university students of French and a native French teacher. The error in question consists of a mispronunciation of the second vowel of the name "Napoléon" in the midst of a student presentation on the…

This study investigates the effects of unequal power relations on participation in a group of student teachers and invited professionals in two collaborative workshops in Second Life. The data includes recordings, group reflections, and individual questionnaires. Participation was examined from the aspects of floor space, turn length, and…

In modern education, inequalities are assumed to be reduced by a redistribution of knowledge between the affluent and able on one side, and the poor and unable on the other. This article investigates ways in which the distribution of futures becomes naturalized in everyday school practices where equality is perceived as a goal rather than a…

This paper examines whether the Swedish steering documents for English-language education are ethnically biased, that is, whether Swedish culture and language or "Swedishness" are used as norms when teaching and assessing students. To examine whether such bias exists, the central curricula and syllabi from 1994 and 2000, as well as local…