Stakeholder beliefs in English-medium instruction for young learners in Sweden

Abstract

While several studies have investigated English-medium instruction (EMI) or content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in Swedish upper secondary and tertiary education, few have investigated such programmes in Swedish primary schools. This paper explores perceptions among staff and students about affordances and constraints in the learning of content and languages, drawing on data from a larger longitudinal case study of an English -Swedish bilingual primary class during Grades 4-6. Data consisted of semi-structured interviews with a school leader, 12 teachers and 22 students as well as fieldnotes and photographs from classroom observations. Thematic analysis of the data revealed the belief among staff that learners acquired English naturally by being 'forced' to use it in English-medium subjects taught by native speakers of English. The use of Swedish among students in these subjects was generally seen as a potential scaffold when communicative difficulties arose, as students who were mor e proficient in English could translate and provide their classmates with explanations of difficult concepts in Swedish. However, staff and students nonetheless voiced concerns about students' content learning as well as about limited development of subjec t-specific language in Swedish, which could have implications for their future Swedishmedium studies. Meanwhile, although multilingual students' mother tongues were valued by the students themselves, participants did not acknowledge them as legitimate learning resources for use in the mainstream classroom, where only English and Swedish were allowed to be used in interaction.

Translanguaging in Sweden: A Critical Review from an International Perspective

“…Taken together, publications discussing pedagogical translanguaging show that teachers make use of several languages as an instructional strategy within the same lesson in the following ways: 1) giving explanations of a concept or grammatical aspect in a non-target language, 2) translating new words into a non-target language, 3) making lexical and grammatical crosslinguistic comparisons and 4) using a non-target language for certain sentences in order to index important information (Falk & Lindqvist, 2022;Fuster, 2022b;Ganuza & Hedman, 2017;Gynne, 2019;Källkvist et al, 2022;Norlund Shaswar, 2020Reath Warren, 2017Toth, 2018;Toth & Paulsrud, 2017). In a study in English CLIL schools, Toth (2018) points out that it was mostly English and Swedish that were used as resources, whereas the teachers generally did not make use of minority languages present in the classrooms. Meanwhile, the teachers of Spanish as a ML in Fuster (2022b) often asked students to reflect on and compare, themselves, how the aspect being taught was formed in their respective L1s.…”

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“…The main objective of EMI programmes is the development of communication skills and intercultural relations with native and non-native speakers of English (Dearden, 2015). Finally, yet importantly, it should be highlighted that although CLIL has often been used to describe programmes within primary and secondary education, EMI can be implemented at any stage of the educational cycle (Simpson, 2017;Toth, 2018).…”

English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) at Primary Schools in Indonesia: Challenges and Opportunities

“…On one side, this is a good improvement in education quality to achieve the goal of national education which is producing global competitive human resources. On the other side, this phenomenon also raises new challenges in the practice of Education (Ernawati et al, 2021;Escobar-Alméciga, 2022;Qomariah et al, 2022;Toth, 2018).…”