De tre stora moderna språken i svensk skola –spanska, tyska och franska –erbjuds på en majoritet av grundskolorna, men det finns regionala skillnader både vad gäller skolornas utbud och elevernas språkval. Attityderna till moderna språk är positiva bland de rektorer, lärare och elever som deltagit i vårt projekt. När det gäll...

 The current special issue of Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies features a subset of the papers presented at the symposium Learning, teaching and assessment of second foreign languages in school contexts held at Lund University, Sweden, in December 2016. The symposium was organised by the TAL-project (Granfeldt et ...

This article reports the results of a survey focusing on the educational context of second foreign languages (SFL) to which 147 Swedish secondary school leaders responded. The study aims to provide a picture of how SFLs like German, French and Spanish are organised in a representative selection of Swedish schools across the c...

The present study uses event-related potentials to investigate the role of prediction in the processing of information structure, a domain of language that belongs to the level of the discourse. Twenty-three native speakers of English read short contexts including three Noun Phrases (NPs) (e.g., Either an adviser or an agent ...

Over the past decade, the LLAMA language aptitude test battery has come to play an increasingly important role as an instrument in research on individual differences in language development. However, a potentially serious problem that has been pointed out by several scholars is that the LLAMA has not yet been carefully valida...

Modern work life includes many digital tools, of which the shared digital calendar has attracted little attention in applied linguistics. The framework for this study is mediated discourse analysis applied to ethnographic data from one workplace and eight contextual interviews from eight other workplaces. The data were analyz...

Native language (L1) processing draws on implicit expectations. An open question is whether non-native learners of a second language (L2) similarly draw on expectations, and whether these expectations are based on learners’ L1 or L2 knowledge. We approach this question by studying inverse preference effects on lexical encodin...

This study examines possible crosslinguistic influence on basic word order processing in a second language (L2). Targeting Swedish V2 word order we investigate adult German learners (+V2 in the L1) and English learners (-V2 in the L1) of Swedish who are matched for proficiency. We report results from two offline behavioural t...

The present study uses event‑related potentials to examine subject‑verb person agreement in Spanish, with a focus on how markedness with respect to the speech participant status of the subject modulates processing. Morphological theory proposes a markedness distinction between first and second person, on the one hand, and thi...

This study investigates if participation in mother tongue instruction (henceforth MTI) impacts the biliteracy proficiency of young bilinguals, drawing on examples from Somali–Swedish bilinguals and Somali MTI in a Swedish school context. In the study, biliteracy was operationalized as reading proficiency and vocabulary knowle...

In a bilingual school, the linguistic and semiotic resources of students who speak one, two or several languages can be used in classroom discourse in order to embrace and strengthen the multiplicity of voices and languages in teaching and learning. In this article, four English language lessons ? where the medium of instruct...

This article explores language use and investment among Somali-speaking children and adolescents in Sweden, through group interviews and survey data. Our findings indicate that there are incentives to invest in Somali language learning considering the reported language use patterns and the expressed positive attitudes towards...

Whereas the cognitive advantages brought about by bilingualism have recently been called into question, the socalled‘lexical deficit’ in bilinguals is still largely taken for granted. Here, we argue that, in analogy with cognitiveadvantages, the lexical deficit does not apply across the board of bilinguals, but varies as a fu...