The article focuses on written narratives of 51 Finnish university students who study German, Swedish or French as their major or one of their minors at an advanced level. The study aims to find what keeps these students motivated to study their L2. The data have been analyzed "using analysis of narratives" (Polkinghorne, 1995).…

Purpose: Intelligibility is a core concept of speech-language pathology, central both to the assessment of speech disorders and to intervention in such disorders. One purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability and usability of a single-word assessment procedure, the Swedish Test of Intelligibility for Children (STI-CH), in a clinical…

The overarching aim is to explore what teachers perceive as the opportunities provided by using literature in ethics education in compulsory school. When being interviewed, in what ways do the teachers express views on the potential of fiction to encourage students to accept certain human conditions as imaginable, or to create motivation for…

In 1981, Sweden was the first country in the world to entitle deaf pupils to a bimodal-bilingual education. However, drawing from interviews with key past Stockholm teacher trainers and on our own efforts to update teacher training, we note that sign-bilingual teacher training in Sweden has been ad hoc to this day. The interviewees' accounts…

The importance of supporting children's reading engagement and reading comprehension from the early years is widely acknowledged, particular for children growing up in areas characterized by socioeconomic challenges. This mission is collectively shared by teachers and librarians, although with differing starting points and responsibilities. This…

Research indicates that beliefs on the locus of the primary source of learning can have negative effects on learning behaviors in school (Mercer & Ryan, 2011). To an increasing extent, young people in Sweden acquire English outside school through different cultural practices (Sundqvist & Sylvén, 2012). At the same time, students lack…

Our main aim in this study was to compare encouraging feedback practices in Finnish general upper secondary foreign language classes and examine how students perceive language teachers' assessment practices. The participants were 160 students of English, 95 students of Swedish, and 27 students of French from six general upper secondary schools.…

Much of what is known about autism and literacy instruction is derived from studies including monolingual English-speaking children. Yet, less than one-fifth of the world's population are English speakers. This review examines the research on literacy instruction for children with autism learning to read and write in languages other than English.…

The aim of this article is to generate knowledge about an MTT classroom in a Swedish elementary school and how MTT is positioned as a safe space for translanguaging. By studying a school context as a potential translanguaging space, our focus is mainly on two dimensions of space: the physical, including the material space of MTT, and the social,…

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…

This study investigated how modeling in chemistry affect second language learners' descriptions of polymeric concepts. The aim was to investigate how chemistry discussions mediated by representations, contribute to second language students' development in the language of chemistry. The study took place in three multilingual upper secondary…

This study examines the washback effects of a national test in Swedish at upper secondary schools. The test consists of three parts--reading, writing and speaking--and this study specifically focuses on the washback effects in relation to Stephen Ball's theory of policy enactment. The study draws on qualitative data from a total of 21 interviews…

Sweden is often commended for the inclusion of home languages in the formal education system: both mother tongue instruction (where a pupil's home language is taught as an optional school subject) and study guidance (where a pupil is given content support in their home language or prior language of schooling) are offered. Still, while many…

In Scandinavia, plurilingualism has been embraced as an important goal in language curricula. However, research shows that teachers struggle to understand what plurilingualism is and how it can be implemented. To address this lack of clarity, we analysed the curricula for the three main language subjects of schooling in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden…

The study explores Finnish compulsory school language teachers' formative and summative assessment practices. It aims at finding out what formative and summative assessment modes and tools the teachers use and what kind of evidence they collect for students' final grades. The data were gathered through questionnaires administered in national…