Utbildning på engelska vid svensk universitet: Stödja undervisning, förbättra lärande

The amount of teaching and learning at universities that occurs in second language (L2) English continues to increase rapidly. This situation leads to classrooms where students and teachers have varying levels of English proficiency. L2 listening and speaking skills impact the quality of education and learning that occurs.

As such, students and teachers in English medium education face a number of challenges.

This one-year sabbatical will allow for in-depth investigations of existing data generated from L2 English lectures and related measurements of student learning.

Data include lecture recordings, transcriptions, teacher interviews, student surveys, and student reports collected after lectures.

Importantly, the data set provides insights in to the relation between the teacher’s spoken L2 English output and the students’ receptive listening ability and learning.

All data was collected from 2019-2020 and has generated initial findings; however, several possible research avenues have yet to be explored in this unique data set, including lecture strategies adopted by L2 English-users, affects of various aspects of teachers’ spoken output (e.g., accent, rate of speech), and the influence that student first language (L1) may have on L2 English lecture comprehension in the Swedish university context.

This project will allow for exploration into these topics and will generate a series of publications in high-level scholarly journals.