Speaking a foreign language is a major part of communicating in that language. Since LGY 69, spoken English has received the same attention in teaching as the writing of English; and in the national tests today spoken English is considered 1/5 of the test grade.  However, students in many cases find it more difficult to speak English than to write it and some teachers still focus more on writing and grammar than on speaking. In this essay, I am trying to show how a group of fairly fluent students tackle the oral part of their national test and what strategies they use to overcome linguistic difficulties. In order to do so I have filmed five groups and a total number of 17 students when they do the oral part of their national tests in English in grade nine and also have the students fill out a questionnaire about the experience. The tests took place in March and April 2010. This essay shows that the most frequently used strategy is pauses, unfilled and filled, but that for other strategies the individual differences are great. It also shows that group dynamics play an important role when doing the test and students who are not able to do the test with people they normally talk to do worse in the test setting and that the performance of both boys and girls suffer when being put in mixed groups.

The main purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of a third language’s possible effect on learners’ second language acquisition. There is research how a first language affects the acquisition of a second language and that research has shown that a first language does affect the learning of an additional language in different ways. Even though  it is proven that languages do influence each other in learning processes there is very little previous research that studies if and how a third language can be affected by or affect a learner’s second language. To investigate possible differences in error-making, the first research question is to investigate what kind of errors the students make. The most common errors that students make are when subject-verb agreement is noncontiguous. The second research question is to see if Swedish students who know Spanish make different errors in English subject-verb agreement than Swedish students who do not know Spanish. This study finds that there are slight differences in how Swedish students who know Spanish and students who do not know Spanish make errors with English subject-verb agreement. The difference is that the students who know Spanish make fewer errors with noncontiguous subject-verb agreement, especially in relative clauses and with coordinated verb phrases. The fact that these students make fewer errors with noncontiguous subject-verb agreement may be an indication that they have a greater understanding of this grammatical feature. / Lokalt ID: 2011vt4810