Core Content and Concretised Goals in the Swedish Upper Secondary English Curriculum

Abstract: The Swedish Upper Secondary English Curriculum consists of lists describing required core content and attainment levels necessary for assessing students on English courses 5, 6 and 7. These lists display relevant instructional information for individual English courses in different places, complicating efforts in course planning. This study performs a text analysis on the curriculum’s core content and attainment level information, with the aim of making the information more accessible and useful in course planning and assessment. The text analysis synthesises attainment levels into concretised goals and then further analyzes the concretised goals to evaluate how they evolve over the English courses. A text analysis is performed on the curriculum’s description of core content to evaluate how they evolve over the English courses. The results, showing the evolution of both core content and concretised goals over the English courses, are displayed in a tabular format for ease of comparison. In addition, the results comprise a list of concretised goals in each course. The concretised goals evolve to a relatively small degree over the English courses, whereas the core contents evolve to a relatively larger degree over the English courses. This study may be of use in helping teachers in their course planning and assessment first, by providing a checklist of concretised goals that can be used in planning instruction aimed towards student fulfilment of curriculum attainment levels; second, by providing user-friendly information on concretised goals and core contents and their evolution over the English courses.