This article presents a study on Google Translate search strategies among 16 Swedish senior high school students (age 17–18) engaging in writing tasks during their sixth year studying Spanish L3. The ...students wrote on laptops with Internet access and were allowed to use Google Translate to search for Spanish words. Analyses of approximately 43 hours of screen recordings covering the writing of 57 essays reveal a complex weave of Google Translate search strategies performed in Swedish, English, and Spanish. The strategies combine lexical and morphosyntactic searches, ranging from single words to longer sequences of words. The searches were frequently characterised by trial-and-error-based approaches that comprised numerous control translations of already known words. The observations also reveal search behaviors interpreted as lack of trust among the students in the search results and in their own language skills.
This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority ...language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, adding evidence from other lesser studied domains, such as definiteness and phonology. We propose that in addition to the linguistic make-up of the phenomena in question, the size of the heritage community and, relatedly, opportunities to use the language need to be taken into account. The latter may explain, for example, why moribund varieties of German and the Scandinavian languages in North America appear to be less stable than the language of second-generation heritage speakers in Europe.
This article presents the results from an ongoing project on naming patterns in Swedish textbooks from the 1920s to the 2010s, focusing on changing representations of gender and cultural diversity. ...Personal names are closely related to personal, social, and cultural identities, and this article therefore argues that the use of such names in textbooks contributes to indicating to pupils who should (and who should not) be seen as part of society, who is considered important enough to know by name, who is desirable to identify with and which names are considered appropriate for a certain identity. Six social science textbooks were analyzed using both quantitative analyses (of names) and qualitative analyses (of the illustrations of named and unnamed people). The results show how and to what extent the use of gendered and culturally marked personal names in social science textbooks changed over the period of study and emphasize some of the tensions involved in this process.
The Nobel Prize in literature can be used as a tool for selecting high prestige literature, i.e., consecrated and canonised literature. This paper examines the Swedish publishing of six Nobel Prize ...in Literature laureates 1970-2016 that have a connection to an African country: John Maxwell Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Doris Lessing, Naguib Mahfouz, and Wole Soyinka. By examining all Swedish editions of the laureates, their respective publishing trajectories can be explored, which enables the study of publishing practices of high prestige literature in the Swedish semi-peripheral language space. The publishing trajectory of Wole Soyinka is interesting, since he was introduced in Swedish by the independent publishing house Cavefors förlag. Cavefors was important as a publisher of African literature in Sweden, and was invested in 'the African question'. Cavefors was able to stabilise their financial situation thanks to the Swedish state financial subsidy for translated and literary valuable fiction, introduced in 1975. All these aspects play an important part in understanding the mechanisms activated by the Nobel Prize and its consequences for the publishing of translated high prestige literature in the Swedish context.
Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers' agency and how they negotiate between two ...languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We found that in each context the teachers reported modifications to an initial bilingual education model over time: from a strict separation of languages, to flexible bilingual practices. A thematic analysis of the contents of the teacher reflections as they emerged through interviews revealed five shared categories: (a) the flexible use of two languages; (b) responsible code-switching; (c) contextual and linguistic supports; (d) adjustments for individual children; and (e) role-modelling. Despite the different settings and socio-linguistic conditions, the similarities in teachers' practices and the rationale they gave for applying flexible bilingual practices were significant. The shared practices across contexts may have important implications for bilingual education.
This paper aims to bring research on different forms of group-level cognition into conversation with Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), the focal point of the paper being cognitive processes in ...translation teams. It is argued that an analysis of cognition in translation teams, which exhibit the properties of a cognitive system, needs to be placed on group-level. A case study of a team, translating the Hebrew Bible Book of Psalms into Swedish in the 1980’s, is presented. The empirical base for the case study consists of archival material in the form of draft translations and paratexts. The methodological question is thus raised whether, and if so in what way, cognitive processes may be analyzed retrospectively, and not only from a real time perspective. By treating the archival material as cognitive artifacts which have constituted an integral part of the team’s cognitive process, the question is tentatively answered in a favourable way. This, it is finally argued, opens up interesting possibilities for joining CTS with translator archives research, Genetic Translation Studies (GTS), and cognitive archeology.
With the increasing demand for gender-fair language, an important issue to take into consideration in academic writing is the use of so-called epicene pronouns, i.e. singular personal pronouns ...unspecified for gender. Yet, little research has focused on how L2 English academic writers use these pronouns. The present study examines the use of epicene pronouns since the 1970s in L2 academic writing and analyses their current use, starting from 2010. The data originate from two corpora with academic papers written by Swedish-speaking university students of English: (1) the Finland-Swedish BATMAT corpus, which is used to extract diachronic data, and (2) the Swedish subset of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase, VESPA-SE, which adds to the data of current use. The results show that although the use of generic he has decreased noticeably since the 1970s, there is considerable variation in and between the texts from the 2010s. Such variation is indicative of a language change that is still very much in progress. The findings also suggest that singular they is establishing itself as a third-person singular pronoun in L2 academic writing since this pronoun is used frequently with all types of epicene antecedents in the data of current use.
This article discusses teacher autonomy in the case of the Swedish teaching profession since the 1980s. It is argued that deregulation, decentralization, and marketization reforms of the 1990s have ...indeed increased teacher autonomy, but in some respects also led to a increase of complexity in the Swedish school system. In order to handle this complexity, the state intensified a standardization of schooling, which restricts teacher autonomy today. Relevant the paper's understanding is that teacher autonomy is always about control, exerted internally by the profession itself and facilitated externally by state standards. The article argues that the restriction of teacher autonomy in recent times is also related to a simplified understanding of the phenomenon in the reforms of the 1990s.
Literary works are read and studied in English across the different parts of the Swedish education system, primary education, secondary education, higher education and teacher education. This article ...considers the rationale—the purposes and benefits—for doing so that are implicitly or explicitly pointed to in curricular documents, with special focus on the kinds of engagement with literature that are authorised by the academic English subject community for the Swedish academic and school contexts. By juxtaposing and synthesising findings from three previous curricular studies, the article identifies substantive justifications and, drawing on linguistic legitimation theory, discursive forms of legitimation that interoperate in syllabi and in other steering documents to claim the validity of engaging with literature in English. It shows that the rationale that remains constant across the education system relies on the links between literature and cultural learning, or analysis, and likewise on the potential of engagement with literature in English for furthering an understanding of the world and for fostering a desired democratic citizen ethos. The cross-educational perspective of the article shows that the interdependence between the different parts of the education system has both thematic and conceptual consequences for the kinds of engagement with literature that are given the status of official legitimations.
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