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This study is founded on my personal interest in Swedish as a language as well as a subject in the Swedish school system. The development of pupils in terms of the Swedish language has always interested me, in particular the writing development and what motivates pupils to write texts. During my time as a teacher, I have observed several key factors that contributes to the development of pupils’ writing skills; for example, the pursuit of a grade, demands from the teacher, or the interest in a specific genre. However, there are certainly an exceeding number of factors that affects pupils’ writing development.  In addition, as a teacher I have encountered several difficulties present in pupils writing ability as well as their self-perception as writers. For example, during a writing exercise in Swedish 1, a course in upper secondary school, the pupils were learning how to paraphrase. The pupils were asked by me “What makes you into a good writer?”, with a surprised look the pupil said “Writer? I am not a writer? I am just doing the task”. Subsequently, it became clear to me that these pupils do not view themselves as writers. They might not feel that the texts are their own in which their personalities and experiences are present. Thus, I chose to conduct a writing project in the school which I work. The present study will analyse upper secondary school pupils’ self-reflections about their writing. This will be conducted by asking upper secondary school pupils at a school with a vehicular profile to read and write short stories as well as writing reading logs. The idea is that as the pupils were writing their short stories and writings their reading logs I would simultaneously collect and analyse their logs. In conclusion, the study will be based on the pupils’ reading logs. The purpose is to investigate the self-perception of pupils’ writing as they are writing and reflecting over their written production.

One of the hardest challenges that learners may face during the process of acquiring a second language is learning vocabulary. Knowledge of vocabulary is an important factor when achieving the competence to communicate in a foreign language. There are multiple strategies available when it comes to learning new words, depending on factors such as the learner, the environment, and the context. Essentially, as Nation (2001) maintains, there are two ways of learning vocabulary: "incidental learning" and "direct intentional learning". Although there is a growing body of research on vocabulary learning strategies employed by students, studies in the Swedish context that take into consideration both students’ and teachers’ perspectives are scarce. Against this background, this mixed methods study examines on the one hand which strategies to learn and remember new words are preferable from the students' perspective and on the other hand it also investigates what strategies the teachers are actually using and encouraging in the English subject in a Swedish upper secondary school.    The reported preferences of the students indicate that they do not explicitly use vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) to any great extent at all, while their teachers' view is that the students should largely be responsible enough to care for their own vocabulary acquisition. However, the students suggest one VLS to be of great advantage to themselves: to use their teacher as help rather than for example dictionaries or textbooks. This is, however, something that the teachers do not encourage in their classrooms, although previous research has shown the benefits of using source language translations in second language learning.

The Swedish curriculums point out that language is crucial to social interactions, learning and individual development as well as essential to uphold a democratic and multicultural country. However, a recent report from the Swedish National Agency for Education depicts the language introduction programs for immigrant adolescents in Sweden as a school form in great need of development (Skolverket, 2016a). This systematic literature review, which draws on sociocultural theory, contributes to the field of how to teach English to newly arrived adolescents in Sweden. The main findings, gathered from six studies from around the world, suggest several different areas for improvement concerning EFL teaching. A specific pedagogy for EFL learners is suggested as well as targeted professional development for EFL teachers. Additionally, the results point out challenges faced by EFL teachers in multilingual classrooms. Further research could investigate how EFL teachers deal with these challenges. Furthermore, further research could investigate EFL textbooks for multilingual students at upper secondary school in terms of language, culture, identity texts and difficulty level.

The teacher's situation in upper secondary school today is strongly influenced by several factors, both inside and outside the school's walls. One of these factors are the national steering documents that are designed to regulate the educational activities: school law, curriculum and other regulations. The professionalism in the knowledge-based work has changed from being regulated within the profession to be used as a tool for controlling service personnel by the organisation (Evetts 2009, 2013). Based on a professional theoretical perspective and with critical discourse analysis as a method, this study focuses on:  1. To investigate how the teachers’ assignment appears in the steering documents, and what kind of professionalism that is emerging.  2. To investigate the ability of a professional teacher to act based on what appears in the steering documents regarding the characteristics of a profession.  3. The various regulatory documents’ content and formulations linked to previous research, i.e. if it is possible to connect the analysis of control documents with national research on the teacher's professional role and assignment.  The result shows that signs of the teacher's autonomy, discretion, self-control and expertise - characteristics of a profession - are not present in the steering documents, and instead the discourse of control used by the organization seems to have taken a clear place. With documentation requirements, grades based on standardized knowledge requirements and focus on goal attainment, the governing documents seem to limit and shrink the teacher's discretion, which leads to the assumption that the teacher demands greater responsibility, but is given less opportunity to act as a professional.

This study explores the motivation that students in Swedish upper secondary school have for engaging with, and learning, English both in and out of school to find out if there is a gap between them and find a way to possibly bridge this gap if it exists. Students’ motivation has been described as important for their learning and motivation and its effects have been studied in several ways. A study with focus on how informal learning and out of school (extramural) English improve students’ English proficiency have been conducted by Sundqvist (2010) and Socket (2013). The effect of schools, and teachers in particular, on students’ motivation in school or during class has been studied by Sundqvist (2015), Bernaus and Gardner (2008) and Ushida (2005), while a study on what actually motivates students was done by Saeed and Zyngier (2012). This study is conducted through group interviews with four focus groups made up of three students each which come from two different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The results of these interviews are analysed through Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (2000) to determine how motivated the students are and how their motivation is affected by different factors. The results show that students are highly motivated to engage with English activities on their own volition, and that they are highly motivated to learn English. The results also show that teachers have a great effect on students’ motivation and can both raise and lower it depending on how they conduct their lessons. Students want more choice, to learn through authentic English experiences and a teacher that they can relate to.

Abstract This thesis explores how secondary schoolteachers in Swedish, prioritise from the Swedish language history materials. The study includes interviews with two Swedish teachers and inquiries with students in two classes at the social science programme (third year). The student literature that is used has been analysed and the teaching is compared with the Swedish central teaching plan. The results show that the students are weak in placing language at different historical time periods and make conclusions of this. The results from both the inquiries and teaching contents disclose a general weakness as it comes to Swedish language history. The interviews points at the standardizing attitude towards the subject, from the teachers influence the size and the depth of teaching the students get in Swedish language history.

The communicative approach to language learning is widely taught in Western education, and yet its predecessor, the grammar-translation method, is still commonly employed in other parts of the world. In Sweden, the increasing popularity of the communicative approach is often justified by the high level of students’ communicative skills (Öhman, 2013). At the same time, students’ written texts and speech contain many grammatical errors (Öhman, 2013). Consequently, being aware of their tendency to produce grammatical errors, some students express beliefs regarding both the explicit and implicit learning of grammar (Sawir, 2005; Boroujeni, 2012). The objective of this thesis is to gain more knowledge regarding students’ beliefs concerning the learning of English grammar at the upper secondary level, in Sweden. With this purpose a survey was conducted in two schools in Sweden, where 49 upper-secondary English students participated. Qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to process the collected data. Despite some difference in the participants’ ages, there were many similarities in their attitudes towards the teaching and learning of grammar. The results show that the participants in both schools believe that only by applying both, explicit and implicit methods, can they obtain a high level of language proficiency. The results of this study can help teachers in planning different activities that enhance the students’ knowledge of grammar.

The aim of this study is to investigate oral peer review on argumentative speech and to study the attitudes towards this peer review. The investigation was performed in an up-per secondary school class, and it focused on the different types of oral responses students give each other. In addition, the study investigated in what way the students experience this type of peer review. The results show that students reflect on form and performance as well as content, but they place more emphasis on form and performance than content. Students are positive about peer review and its importance for their progress. The investigation shows that peer review is needed, but the methods need to be developed further as response should mirror all parts of a work process, peer review can be used in other situations such as work life as well as in the teaching of other subjects.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate different types of feedback and how they are used in schools, and to see which of them are preferred when it comes to error correction. Feedback is used in schools every day even though it is difficult to know if students really learn from it. Students tend to only glance briefly at the paper or test when it is returned and then throw it away. They are interested in how they scored but not really in how to improve their errors until next time. In this study, students wrote essays which were corrected with four different types of feedback and handed back to the students. The students got a chance to revise them and then the result was analyzed. The students were also given a questionnaire in order for me to find out what kind of feedback they liked the most and compare it to the result of the essay corrections. The different feedback types worked well with different students in general, although, underlining with description did not only work best, it was also chosen as the best type by most students. They seemed to think that this type was good for learning something from the feedback. Most students wanted to look for errors themselves instead of getting the correct answer from the teacher.