This study is based on a previous study made by Ivor Timmis (2002). It explores how important Swedish students find learning English to be and to what extent Swedish student want to conform to native speaker English now that it has become a global language with a multitude of common variants. (Sweden formerly allowed only British and/or American native speaker varieties in English education but have now allowed for other variants as well). The focus of this study was the attitudes and preferences of 69 university students from Västmanlands län and the data was collected using questionnaires. The results suggest that a clear majority of students prefer to learn native speaker English in areas of pronunciation, formal grammar and informal grammar.  Over half of the participants desire to master both formal and informal native speaker English grammar. The results also suggest that even though the students desire to learn informal native speaker English grammar, not all students understand what that means. Based on these results and Timmis’s, this study suggests that the majority of the Swedish university students that participated in the study would prefer to be taught native speaker English, but not all students. Some effort to teach more informal grammar might be wanted by the students since a great majority wish to learn it, but cannot identify it.

<p>English prepositions cause problems for learners of English. The way prepositions are taught has impact on how students learn. Using corpora in teaching makes it possible for teachers and pupils to explore language together and is a good alternative to filling in missing prepositions on worksheets. Sometimes linguistic errors are caused by mother tongue interference. Little research has been made earlier with a Swedish contrastive approach to prepositions but a great deal of literature concern language transfer and mother tongue interference. This essay is written on the assumption that Swedish as a first language interferes with English and causes prepositional mistakes.</p><p>Two classes of ninth graders participated in my investigation. I wanted to find out if students performed better when they had given answers to choose from or when they had to produce the preposition themselves. My study proved that pupils had a better knowledge of prepositions perceptively than productively. It also proved that learners resorted to Swedish when they did not know the correct answer. Many learners fail to recognise prepositions as parts of multiword expressions. By teaching students how to notice grammatical collocations and lexical chunks we can help them to achieve acceptable levels of language proficiency and accuracy.</p>

English prepositions cause problems for learners of English. The way prepositions are taught has impact on how students learn. Using corpora in teaching makes it possible for teachers and pupils to explore language together and is a good alternative to filling in missing prepositions on worksheets. Sometimes linguistic errors are caused by mother tongue interference. Little research has been made earlier with a Swedish contrastive approach to prepositions but a great deal of literature concern language transfer and mother tongue interference. This essay is written on the assumption that Swedish as a first language interferes with English and causes prepositional mistakes. Two classes of ninth graders participated in my investigation. I wanted to find out if students performed better when they had given answers to choose from or when they had to produce the preposition themselves. My study proved that pupils had a better knowledge of prepositions perceptively than productively. It also proved that learners resorted to Swedish when they did not know the correct answer. Many learners fail to recognise prepositions as parts of multiword expressions. By teaching students how to notice grammatical collocations and lexical chunks we can help them to achieve acceptable levels of language proficiency and accuracy.

This study investigates prepositional errors that Swedish 16-year-old students of English produce. The study attempts to understand why English L2 students in Sweden struggle with prepositions by looking at research within the SLA field regarding transfer, interlanguage transfer, implicit and explicit learning. The only extra-linguistic variable included in the study is the variable of gender. The method used to investigate students’ prepositional errors was to hand out a two-part test on prepositions to the students in one Grade 9 class in Sweden. The data was then analyzed and categorized to identify in what construction (PP as adjectival complements, PP as verb complements or PP as adverbials) Swedish students of English produce the most errors. The first part of the test was a fill-in-the-blanks test investigating the students’ productive knowledge. The second part of the test was a grammatical judgement test (GJT) assessing the students’ receptive knowledge. The test was divided into two different parts not to favor one particular test form. The test included a total of 22 students from one class, including 12 male and 10 female students. 8 out of the 22 students answered that they had another L1 than Swedish. A majority of these have lived in Sweden their whole lives, and only two answered that they arrived later in life. In contrast with earlier research and statistics, which show that female students perform academically better than male students, the test showed a clear advantage by the male students in the class. The male students performed better on both parts of the test. The most problematic PP construction for both genders was PP functioning as adjectives. The most common prepositional error that the students performed in the test was negative transfer from Swedish to English.

This study aimed to analyse Swedish EFL students' efficiency on connotations. Connotation isa word's implied meaning which brings neutral, positive, or negative associations in aconversation. In this study, connotations were examined in terms of their appropriateness ifused in different contexts. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether Swedishstudents of an intermediate level showed sufficient skills in comprehending a word'sappropriateness when compared to a native speaker. Furthermore, this study also aimed toanalyse in what ways students engaged in English during their spare time show a correlation tohigher test scores. The results indicate that the Swedish students' combined score on theconnotation test showed less than half of the full score. The results also highlight that thestudents who are engaged in English more frequently compared to those who are not showedhigher test scores.

This thesis will examine interlingual subtitles for online media. The research takes place within the descriptive translation studies paradigm. The source material consists of subtitles for a selection of webcasts found on the video sharing platform YouTube. The analysis will examine how the original dialogue has been translated as well as the form that the subtitles are presented in. An analysis of norm governed subtitles for television programs that follow established subtitling norms will also be made for comparison. Online media and broadcast media are divided into a dynamic and static category respectively in order to treat webcasts as an individual form of media. Dynamic media is defined as digital media created for the Internet, and static media is defined as media created for televised broadcasts. The results do not include qualitative assessments but have shown that subtitles for webcasts do not follow subtitling norms and display a wide range of unconventional approaches. The determining factor that illustrates the nature of webcast subtitles is attributed the diverse group of people writing them.

Inquiry-based teaching has started to find its way into Swedish classrooms and its quest for answers is believed to engage the students by activating them to discover new facts and discourses through the exploration of specific sources. It has foremost become a model to structure history and civics teaching, but international research shows that inquiry-based teaching, or FDU as it is called in Sweden, can also reinforce learning English as a foreign language, EFL. The purpose of my research is to investigate the possibility of implementing the FDU model as a teaching tool in a Swedish EFL classroom as well as student perception of the model. The research questions aim at investigating student perception of the model and whether there are any particular advantages and disadvantages with FDU. Through and action-based study, the FDU was implemented in an advanced EFL class consisting of 17 senior upper-secondary school students, and their perception was evaluated through a graded scale survey of 1-5, which also included three open-ended questions. Even though the survey revealed quite undistinguished results regarding the positive claims attached to FDU such as motivation, increase of attentiveness, alertness and learning reinforcement, most of the students found the model very helpful at providing them with a clear and comprehensible structure and description of the learning objectives. It was also a good opportunity to cooperate with peers in a varied manner. As an English teacher, I found the FDU very helpful for planning and constructing, as well as executing, my ideas. Even though some students reported disadvantages such as confusion due to the vast amount of information included in the FDU and the connection between the different parts of the final assignment, a clear majority said they would like to work with the model again. In conclusion, according to this study FDU shows potential as a structural and clarifying tool, both for the students as well as the teacher.

This study investigates teachers' attitudes towards aural recordings and written English from different English varieties in the Swedish upper primary school EFL-classroom. Data from 27 online surveys and four semi-structured interviews are analyzed. The results show that British and American English are the most accepted varitetis. Australian English is accepted in audio, though not necessarily recognized in writing. Indian English, while mostly recognized, is not as accepted. Swedish English, though still accepted by most, is the least approved of the studied varieties.

This study investigates spelling errors among Swedish students of English. The purpose of this research is to develop a better understanding of the causes of spelling errors and to investigate whether there are any differences between program orientation and gender. The participants are English A students from Swedish high schools in year 1. The data analysed in this study consists of essays written by the participants which have been gathered into the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). The results showed that the academic program has a lower error rate when compared to the vocational program and that female students display a lower error frequency than male students. These results reflect the same pattern found by previous studies on achievement between the programs and across gender. However, when comparing all variables, both gender and program, the results demonstrate that academic male students had the lowest error rate of all groups, which could partially be explained by the fact that the academic male students have a higher level of engagement with video- and online games when compared to the other groups. The language processes that the participants found the most challenging were letter omission, letter insertion and letter substitution. These results follow the same pattern highlighted in previous studies on spelling among both native speakers and learners. Finally, the exchange between the vowels &lt;a&gt;, &lt;e&gt; and &lt;i&gt; was found to be a frequent error among the students. Experiencing difficulties with the correct usage of vowels can be explained as a transfer error.