To Örebro University

Grounded in scholarship on multilingualism, this multimodal case study aims toidentify factors related to ideologies of language and culture in an Englishlanguage classroom in a public lower secondary school in Sweden for an enhancedunderstanding of learning conditions for multilingual students. Using atriangulation of methods, participant observation, materials analysis, andinterviews, the study examines teaching practice, materiality, language use andteachers’ perspectives on multilingualism and their own teaching practices in themultilingual classroom. The study finds a predominance of factors rooted ideologiesof monolingualism and monoculturalism. Teaching practice was marked by thetraditional approach to teaching English with a focus on Britain/the U.K. as ahomogenous monocultural and monolingual nation and a Swedishness normdominated teaching practice and classroom interaction: extensive usage of theSwedish language, examples of teaching strategies related to a contrastive Swedish -English grammar approach and a study of target language culture from a nationalSwedish perspective. An application of Nancy Hornberger’s model of the continuaof biliteracy to the data identifies teaching practice in the classroom as close to the privileged ends. The analysis of interviews suggests that the traditional approach was normalized and that teachers had limited awareness of pedagogical strategiesfor the inclusion of multilingual students.