Translanguaging in English Classrooms in Sweden? : A Study of Teacher Beliefs and Practices

In English Language Teaching in Sweden, the entextualized ideology is monolingual, i.e., English Only (Hult, 2017; Lundahl, 2012). Evidence from a large-scale classroom observation study (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2011) and a smaller-scale classroom-interaction study (Authors 3 & 4 2016) reveals a de facto bilingual policy of both English and Swedish enacted in classrooms, however. As studies focusing on English teachers’ beliefs are lacking, we do not know whether in-service English teachers themselves endorse the monolingual belief that is entextualized in education policies (Hult 2017) and materials for pre-service teachers (Lundahl, 2012). In this paper we address this research gap by reporting quantitative results from a nation-wide questionnaire administered to a stratified random sample of in-service teachers of English in Swedish secondary schools (N = 139). The questionnaire, administered online in 2017, targeted beliefs and self-reported practices linked to the use of languages in the English classroom. The results show that an overwhelming majority of teachers (98%) saw multilingualism as something positive, and 83% said that background languages should be drawn upon when learning an additional one. More specifically for English, 63% agreed that pupils learn English best if they are allowed to use their background language(s) in the learning. At the same time, seemingly conflicting, c. 60% stated that they use English only when teaching, and 66% that pupils learn English best if they stick to English only during English lessons. These results will be interpreted through the theoretical lens of ‘educators as policymakers’ (Menken & García, 2010), where teachers are conceived of as active agents implementing language education policies as well as language (learning) ideologies into their teaching practices