English Outside the Classroom : A study of the impact of Extramural English on students' receptive skills

Abstract: This study sets out to investigate whether and to what extent activities involving Extramural English (EE) have an impact on how students in the sixth and ninth year of the Swedish school-system perform on the national tests of listening and reading comprehension issued by the National Agency for Education. In order to test this, the students participating were asked to fill out a questionnaire asking about their contacts with English outside of the classroom environment and were then administered old national tests of reading and listening comprehension as part of their regular classroom instruction. The data collected was analysed in SPSS in the form of correlation analysis and ANOVA. It was found that EE-activities may indeed impact how well the students perform in tests assessing receptive skills and that certain activities (such as reading, gaming, engaging in oral communication) yielded greater gains than others (such as watching movies and TV-series). In addition to this, the study indicates a difference between how profound of an impact EE-activities have depending on the age of the students, with the older students benefiting more from EE than the younger.