The Swedish gender-neutral pronoun (GNP) "hen" has been in popular use since its (re)introduction to the public in 2012. Earlier research, analysing newspapers, academic papers and blogs, shows two uses of "hen": when gender is unknown and when gender is irrelevant. However, there is a lack of studies of verbal, situated, uses…

Corpus planning has attracted attention ever since Deborah Cameron's seminal "Verbal Hygiene" (1995). However, evaluations of corpus planning aimed at addressing linguistic discrimination have been surprisingly scarce. Because corpus planning costs energy, time and money, evaluations are important for future actions. This study discusses…

In which ways do curricula recognize existential questions of compulsory school students, and what direction is given regarding how to address them? By asking these two questions, this study analyses syllabi for the school subject of religion education and its equivalents in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and in the two German regions of Bavaria and…

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…

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

The development of videoconferencing technology has enabled new modes of combining in-person and remote teaching. In this article, we investigate interactional practices in hybrid language classrooms that combine on-site and remote participation by way of telepresence technology. Telepresence robots are videoconferencing tools that can be remotely…

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 study adopts a conversation analytic approach to present a close analysis of the sequential organisation of a parent-child homework activity in a Swedish-English bi-national family. Families formed within migration contexts are increasingly common in an ever-globalised world, but current research has not fully investigated how parent-child…

This paper studies how transnational children and their distantly located but emotionally close family members recreate their relationship using applications for online video calling. The focus is on the interaction of bodies and language, and if/how proximity of any kind is enabled. A critical posthumanist applied linguistics is embraced and…

Through the study of pedagogic discourse and practice in "introductory classes" (ICs) aimed at new migrant students at a linguistically diverse primary school in Sweden, we discuss pedagogic principles and power dynamics, drawing on Bernstein's conceptual frame. Our ethnographic data consist of teacher interviews and observational…

Taking its point of departure in the idea that language is never neutral but always coded in the masculine or the feminine (Irigaray), the main purpose of the paper is to explore the gendered coding of Religious Education teaching and how this coding interplays in shaping relationships and knowledge in the classroom. As recent research shows,…

This study aims to show how multimodality, that is, the mobilization of various communicative resources in social actions (Mondada, 2016), can be used to teach grammar. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), the article provides a detailed analysis of 2 corrective feedback sequences in a Swedish-as-a-second-language…

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…