In this article, we describe the research and societal needs as well as ongoing efforts to shape Swedish as a Second Language (L2) infrastructure. Our aim is to develop an electronic research infrastructure that would stimulate empiric research into learners' language development by preparing data and developing language tech...

The adjectival agreement of noun phrases referring to human individuals in Swedish is renowned for its complex pattern of variation between -a and -e. This article reports three studies on the subject. The first one maps the use of the marked form -e, and finds it to be mainly used for males and gen...

I denna artikel beskriver vi våra erfarenheter av antagningsprov på Tolk- och översättarinstitutet under de senaste åren, d.v.s. från institutets tid som fullt integrerad del av Stockholms universitet. För den svenska högskolan generellt och även för varje högskola separat, gäller särskilda bestämmelser om antagning...

The majority of the world’s nations are multilingual, although many of the languages spoken have little or no official recognition in the conduct of everyday affairs of State, nor do they figure in any major way in development discourses. For example, although UNESCO and other World and regional organizations frequently under...

The Blog's Role for Health Literacy and Knowledge Formation in the Information Society – A Genre Analysis of Structural and Linguistic Patterns in Blogs on Children with Congenital Heart defects

The article explores how genres used on blogs can express certain kinds of knowledge by analysing how parent...

This article discusses cognitive aspects of professional community interpreting. We give an overview of earlier research into community interpreting, arguing that cognitive aspects have largely been neglected. We propose that in building a model of the mental processes of the community interpreter, different kinds of monitori...

This paper aims to contribute to an epistemology of the global South (Santos 2012) by pointing to invisibilized processes of social production as a necessary starting point for greater ethical engagement and mutual intelligibility. It builds on research on the co-construction of micro-interactional identities and macro-social...

PURPOSE: Children and families with a foreign background and limited Swedish proficiency have to communicate through interpreters in childhood cancer care centers in Sweden. Interpreter-mediated events deal with many difficulties that potentially hinder the transfer of information. The purpose of our study was to explore inte...

As society changes, new ways of understanding and using existing semiotic resources are needed. This study looks at artefacts from a social semiotic perspective in order to explore the concepts of ‘recycling’ and ‘upcycling’ and their relevance for pedagogy in Higher Education. We look at recycling in terms of ‘texts’ and emp...

Artikeln behandlar dialekt i barnboksöversättning, på grundval av Emil i Lönneberga i översättning till ryska. Materialet är a) 20 olika översättningar till ryska (2 publicerade och 18 gjorda av ryska universitetsstudenter i svenska), b) studenternas kommentarer till sina översättningar, och c) en fokusgruppsdiskussi...

This article presents a multi-site and multi-method doctoral dissertation study of English-medium instruction (EMI) in the Swedish context, focusing on perspectives and practices in two upper secondary schools. The research explores the status of EMI, reasons schools offer EMI, beliefs about EMI, and implementation of EMI in ...

While Finland and Sweden are internationally known for having education systems promoting equity and equality, recent societal and political changes linked to increased immigration have created new challenges in efforts to support diversity in these contexts.  Concepts such as multilingual education and intercultural educatio...

Translator students’ self-concept has been a key element in several frameworks of translation didactics. This paper explores the notion of self-concept, broadly defined as the way we think about ourselves, from a sociological viewpoint in a longitudinal study, taking its material from three focus group sessions recorded with ...

This article discusses mobility as a semiotic device. Drawing mainly on examples from Stockholm, it analysesbackjumps, a genre of train graffiti that inventively makes use of various forms of movement. The social, spatial existence of backjumps is underlined by mobility, from the moment they are created on temporary stationar...

Swedish education ideology is summarized in the motto: One school for all. The growing number of multilingual pupils from diverse cultural backgrounds in the Swedish school system is, however, presenting new challenges, giving intercultural competence as a specific skill for teachers increasing importance. The presen...

I artikeln diskuteras återkommande ordvalsfel bland avancerade andraspråksinlärare av svenska. Felen har samlats in bland studenter vid Stockholms universitet och är av olika slag: semantiska fel (hyponymer, synonymer, motsatser) och konstruktionsfel (bortfall, tillägg eller utbyte av ord; reflexiva verb, fasta fraser). Felen...

This article engages with Bourdieu’s notion of field as a ‘space of play’ to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, ‘race’, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is...

The design of digital learning environments is not a neutral enterprise. The design tells about the designers’ and developers’ view of a learning activity. The main idea in this paper is to map knowledge about genre pedagogy in practice, in prospect of new applications of technology in future teaching practices. The research ...

"Grammatik från grunden" är en grundläggande grammatikbok med övningar i svenska som främmande språk/andraspråk. Den består av 8 kapitel: verb, substantiv, adjektiv, pronomen, adverb, räkneord, prepositioner och ordföljd. De flesta övningar är försedda med facit och inleds med regler/böjningsmönster och exempel. Dessutom finn...

Swedish is a pluricentric language and has official status in both Sweden and Finland. Until recently, most studies on such languages have focused on differences and similarities in grammar and lexicon, but less on pragmatic variation. We suggest that a pragmatic perspective aids in understanding the relationship between nati...

What would the VA say if Al Roker was a Keystone Kop at Panmunjon? Subtitling is not just a matter of linguistic transfer; building bridges between cultures is every bit as important. This article is based on a subtitled translation of the episode of The West Wing which is the basi...

I denna artikel diskuteras hur ett kommunikationsetnografiskt arbetssätt kan användas i språkutbildningen, för att närmare studera kommunikationen i olika situationer och därmed förbereda vuxna andraspråksbrukare för yrkeslivet i Sverige. Inledningsvis ges en bakgrund till etnografisk forskning och några exempel på studier fr...

Muntlig färdighet är centralt för människan men samtidigt svårbedömt för läraren. I det här kapitlet vill författaren lyfta fram att det är viktigt för lärare att ingående studera samtal för att bli bättre på att bedöma dem. För att öka kvaliteten i samtal – och därmed ge mer underlag för bedömning – beskrivs i det här kapitl...

Language aptitude remains one of the most understudied predictor variables in L1 attrition research. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the effects of language aptitude on L1 retention in late attriters. Forty L1 Spanish - L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden participated in the study, along with 2...

Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine audio-recorded multi-party conversations between a Swedish-/Farsi-speaking resident and multilingual staff in a Swedish residential home, this article describes a practice for establishing shared understanding by one caregiver enacting the role of language broker. The ...

Based on four separate studies, this thesis deals with Swedish academia and its dwellers, with an eye toward accounting for matters of languages and linguistic exchanges. The perspectives and thinking-tools of Pierre Bourdieu form the basis of the main leitmotif, albeit extended with insights from linguistic anthropology and ...

The aim of this thesis is to historize discourses of parenthood by analyzing how they are negotiated and legitimized in Swedish non-literary and wide spread texts published in the 1870s, 1940s and 2010s. The analyzed corpus consists of the following: family and women’s movement magazines from the 1870s; a public coun...

Like that of many other Germanic languages, the stress system of Swedish has mainly undergone phonological analysis. Recently, however, researchers have begun to recognize the central role of morphology in these systems. Similar to the lexical specification of tonal accent, the Swedish stress system is claimed to be morpholog...

The linguistic development of internationally adopted children has been studied extensively for several decades. Whereas this research has mainly concerned toddlers and pre-school children during their first years after adoption, school-age children, and adolescents, there is currently scarce empirical evidence on the long-te...

Artikeln presentarar den nederländske författaren Arnon Grunberg (f.1971), ett av de största namnen i den nederländskspråkiga litteraturen idag. Utgångspunkt är två romaner: Fantomsmärtan 2002 (på nederländska Fantoompijn, 2000) och Moedervlekken (2016, ej översatt till svenska).

Multilingualism and interculturality are established concepts in the Nordic countries. Due to societal change and increasing diversity in schools, these concepts have been subject to constant re-conceptualizations within the educational field. In light of this, the present study explores Swedish and Finnish national school cu...

The aim of this thesis is to define the essential syntactic-semantic properties of three types of objectless sentences in present-day Swedish. The three types of objectless sentences are labeled descriptively as follows: Implicit Object Read type (IOR) with pseudo-transitive verbs like läsa ‘read’; Implicit Object Op...

Språk och ord spelar stor roll i kärleksrelationer. Hur sätter vi ord på lust och behov? Vad kallar vi varandra? Orden fångar känslorna och utvecklar dem. Det här är en ovanlig ordbok som sätter igång samtal mellan älskande och en dialog inom dig själv. Här finns fakta, funderingar och fina citat. Och inte minst intervjuer om...

This dissertation examines Swedish writing centers’ pedagogical positions in relation to surrounding conditions through a case study of organization, attitudes and learning potential in a pedagogical collaboration project on writing with many multilingual students. The data consists of steering documents, students’ texts, int...

The study aims at examining how Swedish upper secondary school students’ development of written academic Swedish is affected when some or almost all content subjects are taught in English instead of Swedish, so-called CLIL education. The study includes three CLIL groups (125 students) with different amounts of instruction in ...

Professor Gunther Kress is one of the international leading researchers in the fields of multimodality, social semiotics, discourse analysis, genre studies and education. He has published widely in these fields, and has a new book out in 2016: Multimodality, learning and communication: A social semiotic frame (written togethe...

This paper is part of my postdoctoral research project called “Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction: postmodern Flemish picture books as semiotic playgrounds”. The paper deals with the influence of new media on the design of ‘older media’, more specific contemporary picture books for children. It unites insights from...

This paper deals with symbolic power and the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML). Tracing some recent developments in Sweden’s language politics (1997–2015), it focuses primarily on the politics of sociolinguistic differentiation and the politicisation of metalinguistic categories. It analyses the con...

Swedish education ideology is captured in the motto: One school for all. However, growing numbers of multilingual pupils from diverse cultural backgrounds in the Swedish school system are presenting new challenges to both teacher educators and teacher students. With approximately 20% of Sweden’s population comprised ...

This is a brief reflection on two decades of work in NGOs and with trade unions from 1982 to 2001. For most of the time covered by this research note, I worked for a non-governmental organisation (NGO), one of several small, politically committed literacy organisations that sprang up in the aftermath of Soweto 1976 as part of...

This paper examines the current language situation on the Åland islands. Åland is a Swedish-speaking autonomous province in Finland. Finland has two national languages: Finnish and Swedish. The Swedish- speaking population in Finland is about 291,000 or 5.3% of the total population (Statistics Finland, end-2014). In Åland,...

Vad är syntolkning? Varför är det viktigt med syntolkning? Vad görs för att utveckla syntolkning i Sverige idag? Vad betyder tillgång till syntolkning för personer med blindhet och synnedsättning? Vad kan forskning inom olika områden bidra med för att utveckla syntolkning? Vad kan syntolkning lära oss om mänskligt tänkande, v...

The question of a sensitive period in language acquisition has been subject to extensive research and debate for more than half a century. While it has been well established that the ability to learn new languages declines in early years, the extent to which this outcome depends on biological maturation in contrast to previou...

The present paper sets out to explore how forms of address are translated from English to Swedish in the specific context of subtitling. The language pair selected for the study presents a distinct translation dilemma as an explicit choice has to be made in Swedish between the familiar T pronoun (du) and the polite V pronoun ...

Can recent second language (L2) exposure affect what we judge to be similar events? Using a priming paradigm, we manipulated whether native Swedish adult learners of L2 Spanish were primed to use path or manner during L2 descriptions of scenes depicting caused motion events (encoding phase). Subsequently, participants engaged...

This presentation addresses language alternation in English-medium instruction (EMI) lessons as related to the concept of translanguaging, with a focus on the practices and perspectives of teachers and students in two Swedish schools offering EMI. The research questions were as follows:

1) What patterns of language alte...

Translation as a profession manifests very few established boundaries: in most Western countries, anyone can start working as a translator, regardless of their qualifications. In consequence, agents in the field are constantly involved in boundary work: constructing, negotiating and maintaining – or critiquing and undermining...

In Old Swedish, the noun bak(er) had the meaning ’back (of a human being or an animal)’, in present-day Swedish, the noun bak means ’bum’. In the 18th and 19th centuries, both meanings occurred in standard language. It is argued that the meaning did not shift directly from one body part to another; rather, the meaning ’bum’ d...

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes 'good' language, or the standard norm. Th...

This study examines the use of praise in caregiving of nursing home residents with dementia in Sweden. The data consist of video-recordings of staff–resident interaction in residential care settings where caregivers assist residents with personal hygiene. High-grade assessments accomplishing praise or a compliment such as ‘jä...