Which language is used in foreign language teaching by upper secondary school teachers — German or Swedish? : An empirical study

By observing and interviewing four certified German teachers this empirical study aims to investigate how and when teachers use German versus Swedish in their German as a second language teaching. The language use was time measured, and it was also investigated in which situations the different languages were used. The findings in this study suggest that there are big differences between the investigated teachers. In the interviews all the teachers stated that their aim was to use German as much as they could while teaching, but the observations in this study show that the half of the investigated teachers act in very different ways in the classrooms in comparison to what they say, and that they use Swedish to a much bigger extent than German. All the teachers mean that it is immensely important that the pupils get to listen to the target language and the general thought is that Swedish should only be used when teaching grammar, but otherwise should German be spoken since the German lessons are the only occasions when the pupils get to listen to the target language. Reasons that are given for the use of Swedish are that it saves time and that there is much more convenient to speak Swedish than German, both for them as teachers as for the pupils who otherwise may have problems in understanding instructions etc. If the pupils have problems in understanding the teachers it also means that there will be a lack of interest in learning German, of which they use Swedish in order to keep up the spirit among the pupils. Surprisingly a teacher who has German as native language use Swedish to a very big extent in this study. She means that she finds it new and strange to use German in Sweden, but also that she finds Swedish as a much more effective language to use in class, and furthermore that the students seem to have something against language teaching, and German in general, which makes it difficult to keep the classes in the target language. To sum up it can be said that the choice of language by the teachers depends on their personalities and thoughts, but also on the Classroom climate in genera