Communicative Language Teaching at two schools in Sweden and France

The following dissertation aims to scrutinize amongst other things, some English teachers’ beliefs and thoughts concerning communicative language teaching at two schools in Sweden and France. Since the steering documents of both countries clearly promote a communicative approach to language teaching, we wanted to see how it could be applied in these two different contexts as well as how it was interpreted by some teachers. With the information obtained from qualitative interviews and classroom observations, we juxtapose what the teachers have said with the steering documents for both countries, their implementations of CLT and the teaching methods adopted in general. In order to do this, an analysis and comparison of the two syllabuses for English was necessary and we also needed to set a foundation by discussing the theories and possible complexities of CLT and teacher beliefs. This discussion could not be valid without also taking into account the status and influences of the English language in Sweden and France. The analysis of the two steering documents showed similar ideas about language teaching. However, Sweden has a separate syllabus for English, whilst France has a joint one for foreign languages. Furthermore, from our interviews and classroom observations we found that all teachers taught grammar in their native language. We also found the French school to be more traditional in that the lessons were often teacher-centered and that the teachers did not allow for any errors in the spoken language. The difference in discipline between the schools was another finding which we found surprising. Finally, our results also indicate occasional discordance between the teachers’ thoughts and ideals and their actions in the classroom