Culture in the Swedish EFL-classroom : Teachers' perspectives on interpretation and implementation

Abstract: The Swedish regulatory documents for the school subject of English demand the presence of cultural representation/phenomena in the communicated material to the students but is vague about what the actual content should be. This leaves a lot of room for personal interpretation and selection of material for the teachers. The objective of this study was to explore how teachers interpret the sought after concept of culture, as well as how they choose to implement it in their lesson-plans. A qualitative study with five grade 7-9 teachers was made, with semi-structured interviews that were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results show that all the teachers found the instructions vague regarding what type of culture was to be included in the teaching. They perceived the vagueness as both a stressor and as a liberating factor, which is in accordance with previous research. The type of culture that was implemented in the teachers’ classrooms seemed to center around so called ‘little c culture’ or ‘social science context culture’ with the goal of achieving ‘intercultural communicative competence’.