Till Örebro universitet

English is increasingly used in parallel with Swedish in tertiary education, particularly as a reading language (Pecorari, Shaw, Malmstr.m, & Irvine, 2011). A majority of course literature across most disciplines in higher education in Sweden today are English-language publications (Bolton & Kuteeva, 2012), even in courses that do not have English as the official medium of instruction (Kuteeva, 2014; Pecorari et al., 2011). Despite this, little research has been done on the use of foreign-language textbooks in contexts where the focus is on content learning (Pecorari et al., 2011). In this presentation, results from a questionnaire and interview study involving university students in Sweden will be presented.

Initial results show that a majority of students feel they were unprepared to read course literature in English when they started university. Approximately half of students express negative emotions in relation to reading in English. These include emotions such as fear, anxiety, panic and stress, but also that reading in English is considerably more time-consuming than reading in Swedish. In this presentation, I will argue that these negative emotions are caused by a lack of preparation forquote from one of the participants:

“I have almost never read any English literature in upper secondary school, so when you have to read English literature at university I feel a lot of pressure, that it will be difficult and that I will not understand (…) It’s a difficult transition.”