Published Article / Research has two important objectives: the contribution to scientific discourse and the identification of solutions for the challenges societies, government, business and industry face. Research should be in the public domain. The publication and presentation of research results are important activities academics need to engage with. Through publications and presentations are societies informed of the positive influence and impact research can bring to them. This paper will focus on the importance of publications and how emerging scholars can be assisted to get their research published. A case study is presented of the Interim, an in-house academic journal.

This paper sets out to examine the most common errors in the national test and whether the students make the same errors in English course B as in English course A at Upper Secondary School in Sweden. The method used for this study is quantitative where nine grammatical features are used to count the errors made. Twenty national tests were used to carry out this study; ten national tests are from English course A and the other ten from English course B. Results from all features from English course A are compared with some features from English course B. The results show that the most common errors made in the national test are subject verb agreement and tense. Those two features had also a worsening in the English course B. The genitive errors have also doubled in English course B. The best improvement happened with the capital letters. Other features either stayed the same or improved slightly. One of the solutions for grammatical errors could be that teachers and students pay more attention to it and that the teachers include more grammar in their lessons so that the students have an opportunity to improve.

Lately most investigations regarding Swedish students’ level in Spanish as a foreign language indicate that there is a notable gap in their linguistic knowledge. It is possible to give various explanations to this tendency, such as the capacity of the educators or the level of motivation the students have. These explications, however, does not explain the fact that this is a problem on a national level. In order to be part of the search to find a potential solution to this issue this investigation has been made with the intention of assessing whether the students truly learn what they are being taught, by means of a modified error analysis, in which there it has also been investigated what part of the Spanish language that seems to be the most problematic to learn for the students at a Swedish upper secondary school. Last but not least this study also attempts to look into the possible influences of the first language and the gender of the learners. The error analysis that has been used consists in a test that contains twelve sentences, of which six are incorrect. All the sentences were based on constituents of the Spanish language that had already been studied in class. The students who participated in this study, all of them at the first, third and fourth level in the curriculum established by Swedish National Agency for Education, where asked to identify erroneous sentences and correct them. In this paper it has been proved that the learners, in fact, have failed to learn a considerable part of what they have been taught. It has also been established that neither gender nor native language can be considered relevant factors in the students’ learning ability. As for the most difficult part in the Spanish language it has not been possible to identify a generalizable result, but a few errors that can be found in more than one of the investigated groups, and therefore point out vital problems in the acquisition-process, has been identified. In conclusion, this paper shows that the knowledge of the Swedish students need some improvement, especially when it comes to ensuring that the learners won’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again.