Preparing Teachers for English Beyond the Classroom in Sweden

In Sweden, English is a mandatory subject from the early primary years as well as pervasive outside the school with so-called ‘extramural English’, e.g., in media, advertising, and online gaming. This dual status challenges traditional boundaries between the prescribed curriculum and pupils’ lived linguistic environments. Anchored in perspectives on curriculum enactment and linguistic landscape research, the present small-scale qualitative study focuses on a course task we designed to raise awareness of extramural English in Swedish primary teacher education: a language walk. Pre-service teachers (PSTs) took photos of texts in English and other non-Swedish languages in their neighbourhood, exploring and analysing where, how, and why these languages were used. They then reflected on how dynamic multilingual public spaces might inform their future classroom practice, in relation to national curriculum aims. 

 

Thirty documented language walks from four PST cohorts (with consent) were thematically analysed using ATLAS.ti, exploring 1) how participants conceptualised language hierarchies and the status of English and other languages surrounding pupils in Sweden, and 2) how they considered planned practical applications of using extramural English in their future teaching. Our results indicate that PSTs reacted to the density and functional diversity of English, often framing it as a lingua franca for tourism and mobility. However, the move from observation to pedagogical design proved uneven. While some articulated concrete ways of integrating “English in the wild” into language teaching, others reproduced more bounded, school-oriented conceptions of English. As teacher educators, we see a need to prepare future primary teachers for the increasing prevalence and complexity of multilingualism in society, especially in relation to the possible inclusion of English found outside the classroom.  As such, we encourage a discussion of the potential of this innovative task in teacher education for English as a second or foreign language.