The aim of this study is to investigate if textbooks and workbooks produced for teaching English to Swedish students in grades 4-6 fulfil the demands set by the curriculum. Furthermore, it investigates if the teaching materials need to be complemented by other media. An analysis has been made of three teaching materials. The analysis is based on national and European policy documents and current language research. The study also investigates how much teachers use textbooks when teaching English, what kind of homework they give that relates to the books and what media they complement with. The study found that all the teaching materials that were analysed follow the curriculum, but that not all areas of communicative skills were treated equally. The survey of teacher’s use of teaching materials found that the use of teaching materials was quite traditional and that most teachers complement with other forms of media.

The aim of this study was to explore the subject of English in the younger school years. The research questions are focused on how much time teachers spend on teaching English, how much English input the pupils are getting, how the lessons are planned and what the pupils think of their English lessons. The methods of the study have been classroom observations and interviews with pupils in both grade one and two. National as well as European policy documents emphazis a communicative view in language learning and teaching, which a majority of the pupils in my classes did not experience as neither the teahers nor the pupils did speak English very often. The classes I observed did have 30 to 40 minutes per week sceduled to English but the avrage teaching time was often less than the time that was scedueled. The pupils biggest english input was from different songs and videos from youtube.

The intention of this study is to find out how the English subject takes form and develops in the early years in school related to the curriculum, teachers, teaching material, students and parents. The methods of the survey have been classroom observations, teacher interviews, textbook analysis and a parents´ questionnaire. The findings of this study are that the knowledge of the teacher in and about the English subject can have effect on how the English subject will be presented to the students during the English lessons and the amount of the students oral production of the target language seem to depended on how much the teacher uses the target language in the classroom. The contents of the English lessons was overall structured by the curriculum. The parents and their interest in their children´s education seem to have had an impact on how much focus the English language get. Parents also seemed to have an influence on the contents of the English subject.

The purpose of this study was to deepen the knowledge about factors that influence students’ willingness and ability to oral interaction in a target language, in this case French. It also aimed to achieve a clearer picture of the tasks the students work with and would like to work with in classroom situations. The study was based on two theoretical frameworks, Willingness to Communicate, which looks into the social and affective factors enhancing the will to communicate, and Task Based Language Teaching investigating how tasks can be designed to promote oral interaction between students in a classroom or in a digital environment. Based on the purpose of the study three research questions were formulated. The first question was about the importance of cognitive factors to promote oral interaction. The second focused on the role Willingness to Communicate and other affective factors play to make students willing to communicate in the target language. The third question aimed at investigating to what extent task-based language teaching occurs in teaching to create opportunities for students to interact in the target language. The design of the study was made up of qualitative personal interviews with students from upper secondary schools in the Stockholm area. In total seven students were interviewed, six of them studying French 4, one of them French 3.  All students highlighted cognitive and linguistic factors as being the most important to interact orally, foremost vocabulary and pronunciation and also the ability to express themselves orally. The students did not consider grammar as an important factor to their willingness and ability to communicate in French. Self-confidence, self-efficacy and the teacher’s attitude are the most important social and affective factors influencing the willingness to communicate. The ones that were considered the least important were anxiety, knowing your speaking partner and the topic of the conversation. The students’ opinion of the least important factors differed from research and empirical studies, which rate these factors higher. The students reported that the teaching did not include Task Based Language Teaching as defined in the theory and that limited use of computer mediated communication was used in the classroom. All students express a desire to communicate and interact with each other more than they do at present as well as to work with tasks and tools both face-to-face and digital enabling this to happen.

This degree project aims to yield new knowledge about oral communication in English classes by investigating whether and to what extent students are given opportunities to develop their communicative abilities. A socio-cultural and pragmatic perspective was adopted and previous research was thoroughly examined. The study rests on the scientific approaches hermeneutics and phenomenography, which also influenced the methods used to collect data, that is, interviews and observations. This study includes four informants who are teachers in years 3–6. These teachers were interviewed and observed during one English class each, which means that their respective groups of students also participated in the study. The results show that English was the language used most frequently in the observed classrooms. The teachers in the study describe problems with using English Only in their classrooms as the students are on different levels of English proficiency. Furthermore, the results show that collegial cooperation is necessary if an expanded and comprehensive view of English teaching in years 1–6 is to be achieved. Finally, the participating teachers expressed a need to develop their own knowledge in teaching English in order to meet the requirements of communicative language teaching expressed in the curriculum. / Mitt arbete syftar till att bidra med ny kunskap om muntlig kommunikation under engelsklektioner genom att undersöka huruvida elever ges möjlighet till att utveckla sina kommunikativa förmågor. Genom ett sociokulturellt och pragmatiskt teoretiskt perspektiv samt en genomlysning av tidigare forskning som rör ämnet söker jag förståelse för hur muntlig kommunikation ter sig i engelskundervisningen. Vetenskapliga förhållningssätt som studien har utgått från är hermeneutik och fenomenografi, vilka även påverkade studiens datainsamlingsmetoder nämligen intervjuer och observationer. De fyra informanter som deltog i studien är verksamma lärare i årskurserna 3-6. Dessa lärare intervjuades samt observerades under en lektion vardera, således deltog även informanternas klasser i observationerna. Resultaten visar att muntlig engelska får stor plats i de observerade klassrummen. Lärarna som deltog i studien beskriver en problematik där en undervisning som huvudsakligen sker på målspråket (English Only) inte fungerar när eleverna är på så många olika nivåer. Vidare visar resultaten att ett kollegialt samarbete anses nödvändigt, dels för att kunna utveckla och strukturera engelskämnet bättre, dels för att skapa en helhetssyn över årskurserna 1–6. Slutligen uttrycker lärarna i studien ett behov av kompetensutveckling där de önskar få tillgång till verktyg för att kunna undervisa i linje med kursplanens kommunikativa inriktning och funktionella språksyn.