Swedish as a Second Language—a Parallel School Subject in Practice : A case study of multilingual students’ lived experiences of Swedish as one language but two school subjects

Abstract: Since 1995 the Swedish language has been taught as two different yet similar and parallel school subjects throughout the educational system: Swedish (SWE) and Swedish as a Second Language (SSL). Building on Hedman and Magnusson (2019a), this case study research focuses on multilingual students’ lived experiences of language and their decision to study SSL as opposed to SWE. Two data sets were collected from focus group interviews with 12 SSL students and by means of a web-based questionnaire completed by 30 SSL students attending a Swedish public high school. The study investigates the reasons why multilingual high school students choose to study SSL despite the legitimacy gap evidenced by prior research (e.g., Economou, 2015; Fridlund 2011) and the ongoing public debate about the justification of SSL as a school subject in its own right. Although equally recognized by institutions of postsecondary education, there is a persistent gap between the implementation of SSL and the school based realities (Skolverket, 2017a). SWE is commonly considered more prestigious, while SSL is often seen as a lower-status alternative to SWE (see Hedman & Magnusson, 2018, for an overview). Based on a thematic analysis in combination with stance analysis, findings show that SSL is considered a justified school subject viewed as a linguistic right (Hult & Hornberger, 2016). It was clear from both data sets that the availability of pedagogical scaffolding as well as social and linguistic belonging constituted the basis for students’ selecting SSL and these findings are consistent with previous research (Bjuhr, 2019; Hedman & Magnusson, 2019a). Nevertheless, these findings do not preclude the fact that some students expressed peripheral concerns in relation to social categorization as a possible negative effect of Swedish as one language but two school subjects. In addition, the construction and physical separation of SWE and SSL per se was not the issue. The negative social categorization was found in the name itself: Swedish as a Second Language as opposed to Swedish.