SFI...why not EFI? : A study of the teaching practices applied when teaching English to immigrants in Sweden

Abstract: My aim with this study is to investigate the teaching strategies applied in teaching English to students with another mother tongue than Swedish. According to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory, factors such as age, language competence and mother tongue influence can affect language acquisition. SLA theory also states that multilinguals tend to select one of their languages as their primary source of information and this language is the language that most resembles the target language; Swedish and English are both Germanic languages and therefore share language closeness. Results showed that regardless of age and mother tongue, equal numbers of students chose to source Swedish only or both Swedish and their mother tongue when translating texts from English; only 3 chose to source their mother tongue only. There is to date little research that directly connects teaching approaches with SLA, particularly when dealing with multilingualism. I believe a potential area for research could be to investigate the possibility of developing teaching strategies that can potentially harness prior language knowledge. My investigation also showed that English is taught to native and non-native Swedish speakers alike through the medium of the Swedish language; that is to say the course books consist of English text with vocabulary translations and grammatical exercises from Swedish to English. A suggestion would be to reduce the use of the English to Swedish translation methods, particularly for students with a limited knowledge of Swedish, and incorporate into lessons more communicative teaching methods using authentic materials and real situations.