English and German in Swedish Classrooms: Writing in the two Languages Compared

Swedish learners of English are bombarded daily with authentic communication. Many of them spend hours a day with computer games where they both receive and produce English in an interactive process. The situation for the other major European languages is not quite so favourable. German, for instance, is seldom heard or seen in computer or other media contexts nor is it so generally recognised as important to speak German. This can be assumed to have an effect on both teachers’ and learners’ concepts of the goals for language learning in schools, as well as on the development of language proficiency in the classroom. We have therefore chosen to study an aspect of language proficiency, writing, and compare the results of learners in school and in the first term of university studies in English and German. We focus on the vocabulary in written free production, in order to analyse some of the differences and similarities between Swedish pupils’ proficiency in the two languages. Teachers’ attitudes to and methods of teaching the two languages may well differ and this is also a question we raise in the study.