This is a corpus-based study on adjective use in eighty written compositions by Swedish learners of English from Grade 7 and Grade 9 in junior high school, and from Year 1 and Year 3 in senior high school. The aims of the study are to conduct an analysis of the use of attributive adjectives in noun phrases, and to investigate how attributive adjective use contributes to the syntactic complexity of noun phrases. This study proposes a hypothesis of the complexity of noun phrases in relation to different types of attributive adjectives, that is to say, an assumption that more complex types of attributive adjectives contain more compact information that requires more effort to learn and use.  The investigation shows that Swedish learners of English in junior and senior high school use an overwhelming number of noun phrases without premodifiers. The findings confirm that less proficient students use more adjectives as premodifiers in noun phrases than nouns as premodifiers. The results of the examination also reveal that students from the four school levels investigated use the most common attributive adjectives frequently, which accouts for more than half of the attributive adjectives used. However, a positive trend is that the use of more complex types of adjectives, such as derivational and participial adjectives, steadily increases in number when students advance in school level.  The comparision of the most common attributive adjectives in proportion to other adjectives used in the data from each grade shows that more proficient students use a richer variety of adjectives than less proficient students. Some pedagogical implications in this connection are the need to raise Swedish students’ awareness of different types of adjectives in language teaching and learning. Other pedagogical suggestions are the need to develop students’ skills in elaborating ideas and consolidating syntactic structures in their writing.       Keywords: syntactic development, noun premodification, attributive adjective, Swedish learners of English

Over the last few decades, the interpersonal dimensions of academic writing have received growing attention in the field of applied linguistics. As an important concept in academic writing, engagement has been a topic of interest to reveal how writers interact with readers to, for example, guide reasoning through arguments and to abide by conventions of politeness. Previous research has suggested that the higher students’ academic level is, the more similar their use of engagement elements in writing will be. Previous research has also suggested that for non-native speakers, cultural factors as well as interlanguage, influence how engagement features are used in written English. The primary aim of this study was to investigate which engagement patterns could be found in L1 Swedish and L1 English students’ academic writing in English, with the focus on linguistics as a subject. Using the methods of corpus linguistics, this project also strove to identify the ways patterns of engagement differed between L1 Swedish and L1 English students, and in what ways patterns of engagement varied between the students at B-levels and C-levels in written English of linguistics studies. The data for the study came from SUSEC, which is a corpus of written English that consists of texts collected at Stockholm University in Sweden and at King’s College in England. In line with previous research, the results indicate that the L1 Swedish students use more elements of engagement than the L1 English students. Results also suggest that C-level students use fewer reader pronouns than B-level students, and that Swedish C-level students use more directives than Swedish B-level students. Overall, the comparison of students with two different first languages revealed several differences on how engagement is used, which can serve to inform future research on academic writing.

In classrooms all over the world, there are students who fear the attention of both teachers and peers alike. Anxiety is a cause for such fears and in foreign language classrooms it can be prevalent. Foreign language anxiety (FLA) is a concept developed by Horwitz et al (1986) to describe the unique anxiety that arises in a foreign language learning situation. Anxious students are less prone to use their target language and feel less motivated in their language studies, both of which have a negative effect on their learning. The aim of this study was to measure and compare anxiety levels among Swedish lower and upper secondary school students, identify major sources of anxiety and gain understanding of individuals’ perception of foreign language anxiety. 49 subjects from two classes participated in the study. Their anxiety was measured with the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) developed by Horwitz et al (1986). Interviews were used to gain insight into the subjects’ perception of foreign language anxiety. The results showed that a majority of the subjects were anxious and that students in the lower secondary school class were more anxious than the upper secondary school class. The identified major sources of anxiety were teacher-induced anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and general anxiety. / I klassrum över hela världen finns det elever som är rädda för både lärarens och sina klasskamraters uppmärksamhet. Nervositet är en orsak till en sådan rädsla och kan vara vanligt i främmandespråkklassrum. Språkängslan inför främmande språk är ett begrepp utvecklat av Horwitz m. fl. (1986) för att beskriva den unika nervositet som uppstår vid lärande av främmande språk. Nervösa elever är mindre benägna att använda språket de lär sig och känner sig mindre motiverade att lära sig och båda sakerna har en negativ effekt på deras inlärning. Syftet med studien var att mäta och jämföra nervositetsnivåer bland svenska högstadie- och gymnasieelever, identifiera de största källorna till nervositet och få förståelse för elevers uppfattning av nervositet. 49 elever från två klasser deltog i studien. Deras nervositet mättes med skalan för språknervositet i samband med undervisning i främmande språk, utvecklad av Horwitz m fl (1986). Intervjuer användes för att få insikt i deltagarnas uppfattning om språknervositet inför främmande språk. Resultatet visade att en majoritet av deltagarna led av språknervositet och att högstadieeleverna i högre grad var nervösa än gymnasieeleverna. De största källorna till nervositet som identifierades var lärarorsakad nervositet, rädsla för negativt omdöme och generell nervositet.

The ways in which someone’s first language (L1) influences his or her second language (L2) to create errors, that is negative transfer, is a topic that has received much attention in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Previous research has suggested that negative transfer is responsible for many errors. The primary aim of this study is to investigate article and preposition errors in the production of Swedish learners of English and to discuss these errors in relation to negative transfer. The secondary aim is to compare transfer errors by L1 Swedish and L1 Portuguese learners of English.   The first and main part of the study is a corpus investigation of the written production of 80 students in upper secondary school (high school). The second part is a multiple-choice test constructed to provoke transfer errors. It was distributed to students in upper secondary school in Sweden and in Brazil. The results from the corpus analysis are largely in line with those of previous research, for example with regards to how definite article errors are more common than indefinite article errors, and how contexts with definite articles and generic noun phrases seem prone to create transfer errors. The corpus study also shows that substitution was the most common preposition error and that many transfer preposition errors supposedly were caused by direct translations. Through the multiple-choice test, the degree to which the first language had an impact on individual errors could be revealed. All in all, the study reveals several aspects of negative transfer that perhaps a single-language investigation could not, because it is in the comparison of English-learners with different L1s that the most interesting results occur. / De sätt som någons första språk påverkar hans eller hennes andra språk så att fel uppstår, det vill säga negativ språköverföring (negative transfer), är ett ämne som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet inom forskning kring språkinlärning. Tidigare studier har visat på hur negativ språköverföring orsakar många fel. Det primära syftet i denna uppsats är att undersöka artikel- och prepositionsfel i skrift hos svenska elever som lär sig engelska och att diskutera dessa fel i relation till negativ språköverföring. Det sekundära målet är att jämföra hur negativ språköverföring yttrar sig hos svenska och portugisiska elever som lär sig engelska. Den första delen av denna uppsats, som även är huvuddelen, är en korpusundersökning av 80 uppsatser skrivna av högstadieelever. Den andra delen är ett flervalstest som konstruerats för att provocera fram språköverföringsfel. Deltagarna var högstadie- och gymnasieelever från Sverige och Brasilien. Resultaten från korpusundersökningen stämmer i stor utsträckning överens med vad tidigare forskning visat, till exempel att det är vanligare att fel uppstår med bestämda artiklar än med obestämda artiklar och hur bestämda artiklar och tillsammans med generiska nominalfraser tenderar att generera negativ språköverföring. Korpusstudien visar också på hur felaktigt utbyte (substitution) var det vanligaste prepositionsfelet och att många språköverföringsfel förmodligen orsakats av direkta översättningar från svenska. I analysen av resultateten från flervalstestet kunde graden av inflytande från första språket på enskilda fel påvisas. Sammantaget avslöjar undersökningen i denna uppsats på flera aspekter av negativ språköverföring som troligen ej uppenbarats om enkom elever med ett förstaspråk inkluderats, detta eftersom det är i jämförelsen mellan engelska-elever med olika förstaspråk som de mest intressanta resultaten framkommer.

This is a study that employs error analysis to investigate written production in English, by Swedish upper secondary learners of English, in order to determine which linguistic errors most commonly occur amongst this group, and to compare the results between first-year students and third-year students for a possible indication of which error types continue to occur throughout upper secondary school. The error categories included in this study are grammatical errors and errors as a result of transfer. The variable of gender will also be taken into account, due to the statistics and previous research that show female students tend to achieve higher results in academics. The purpose of the study is to gain a better understanding of how Swedish upper secondary learners acquire English, and to uncover which areas are most challenging for them, in the hopes of highlighting areas within ELT that may need revision. The participants of the study are students attending Swedish upper secondary schools, year 1 and 3. The analyzed data was collected from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC), which consists of texts produced by Swedish learners of English attending middle school and upper secondary school.     The results show that certain error categories and types are consistently challenging for both first-year students and third-year students, which provides an indication of which areas in ELT might be lacking. Within the grammatical error category, all groups demonstrated a significant lack of knowledge pertaining to subject-verb agreement, as well as prepositions, which are both to a certain degree attributed to the first language; meaning, they may be the result of transfer. The male students were shown to outperform the female students; however, the female third-year students produced fewer errors than their male counterparts, which suggests a faster progression. The male third-year students were shown to have the same error rate as the male first-year students, which suggests a slower progression. While the third-year students produced fewer errors overall, the error types they struggled the most with are the same error types most commonly occurring in the first-year group, suggesting pedagogical remediation is needed.

Proper spelling is important for efficient communication between people with different first languages in the 21st century. While Swedish functions as an intranational language within Sweden, it sees little to no use outside of Scandinavia. English fills the role as a second language that all Swedish students must learn, yet more focus appears to be given to grammar rather than spelling. Spelling is important and knowing the kinds of spelling errors Swedish learners of English tend to make can help educators improve the spelling proficiency of their students. The aim of this study is to investigate the spelling errors made by senior high school students in Sweden by analyzing a collection of essays written by students and gathered in the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). The results of this study show that spelling proficiency nearly doubled for students in their third year in senior high school compared to their first year, yet the distribution of spelling errors remained the same. Additionally, some particular sounds that appear to be especially problematic for Swedish spellers were identified, such as /ə/, /l/, /s/ and /k/. / Korrekt stavning är viktig för effektiv kommunikation mellan människor med olika modersmål i tjugohundratalet. Medans svenska fungerar som ett språk mellan människor inom Sverige, ser det lite till ingen nytta utanför Skandinavien. Engelska fyller rollen som andraspråk som alla svenska elever måste lära sig, ändå sätts mer fokus på grammatik över stavning. Stavning är viktig och att veta vilka typer av stavfel som svenska elever brukar göra på engelska kan hjälpa lärare förbättra elevernas stavningskunskaper. Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka svenska gymnasielevers felstavningar i Engelska genom att analysera en samlig essäer skrivna av studenter och samlade i Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). Resultaten från den här studien visar att stavningskunskaperna hos eleverna hade nästan fördubblats när de gick det tredje år på gymnasiet jämfört med när de gick det första, men att fördelningen av stavfel förblev densamma. Dessutom har vissa ljud identifierats som verkar vara särskilt problematiska för svenska elever att stava, såsom /ə/, /l/, /s/ and /k/.