This empirical study investigates how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Swedish upper secondary schools succeed in their use of English prepositions. EFL learners in Sweden today represent a multitude of nationalities and ethnic groups with many different first languages (L1); therefore, English teaching could be subject to change in order to adapt to the new situation. The study is based on an online survey given to pupils taking “English 7” at upper secondary schools in Stockholm. The study aims to find patterns in how pupils with Swedish as their L1 handle English prepositions and use a control group consisting of pupils with another L1 in a comparative analysis based on language transfer. A teacher of English at the respondents’ school was interviewed to elicit teaching methodology and how they use the language diversity in the classroom when teaching prepositions. Even though it was hypothesised that negative language transfer was a factor, the analysis of the focus group shows that negative language transfer from Swedish did not inhibit the focus group’s ability to choose prepositions compared to the control group in the given context. In contrast, positive transfer from Swedish as an L1 contributed to a substantial increase in success rate. However, no clear connection could be made to teaching methodology as the interviewed teacher did not have any specific method for dealing with prepositions and mainly treated teaching prepositions implicitly. Furthermore, the interviewed teacher did not use language diversity in classroom as a tool for learning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-144100 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Johansson, Björn |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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