Some Swedish students´learning of subject-verb agreement in English

Abstract: Persons with Swedish as their first language often find it hard to learn subject-verb agreement when studying English. In Swedish this grammatical difficulty does not exist and it is therefore hard to introduce to learners that have Swedish as their native language.This investigation is based on the texts of 28 ninth graders of whom four were interviewed. My interest was in finding out how the students reflect on their own written work with a focus on subject-verb agreement with a particular focus on the third person singular s.My study shows that the four interviewed students claim that they never reflect on grammar in their spontaneous writing and that they never consciously try to apply rules that they have studied in school through being offered grammatical explanations. Instead they make their grammatical choices intuitively, using their procedural knowledge.