Stockholm university

Angelica GranqvistPhD student

About me

Starting September 1, 2020, I am a part time doctoral student at the Department of Teaching and Learning at Stockholm University, meaning that I spend four days a week on my doctoral studies. My program in language education is funded by Vallentuna Municipality where I continue to teach classes at Vallentuna Gymnasium (high school) on Mondays.

I am a licensed teacher of English and Swedish, grades 7-12, and I have taught at Vallentuna Gymnasium since the fall of 2011. In addition to my teaching, I have developed different international connections and programs such as the one with the Butler University College of Education in Indianapolis, USA. Our ongoing project Text as an Expression of Identity was awarded with the European Language Label in 2018. Moreover, I have many years of experience of mentoring pre-service teachers, mostly from Stockholm University and Uppsala University, but also from Butler University where I have been invited as a guest lecturer on several occasions.

For the last five years, I have taught high school cohorts where the two school subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language  are integrated and my research interest has grown out of this particular educational practice. In my master's thesis  (2019), I focused on high school students’ choice to study Swedish as a second language in a practice where the subjects were separate. The findings showed that to a large extent, the feeling of social and linguistic belonging as well as the access to adequate pedagogical scaffolding constituted the students’ reasons for choosing Swedish as a second language rather than Swedish.

 

Research

In my present research project, I intend to deepen my focus on how students and teachers perceive and construct social and linguistic belonging together with scaffolding in an educational practice where Swedish and Swedish as a second language are taught synchronously in the same classroom. Consequently, the classes of Swedish as one language but two school subjects are taught by a teacher who is licensed and qualified to teach both subjects.

My dissertation advisors are Christina Hedman, professor of Swedish as a second language, and Dorota Lubinska, assistant professor in language education. Both Dr. Hedman and Dr. Lubinska are on the faculty of the Stockholm University Department of Language Education.