The growing importance of internationalization for universities across Europe has resulted in an increasing use of English at various levels of higher education (Bolton & Kuteeva, 2011; Seidlhofer, 2010). In Sweden, a majority of course literature across most disciplines in higher education 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 students' perceptions of academic reading in English as a second language. In this paper, I will present the results of a questionnaire and interview study involving more than 500 Swedish upper secondary school and university students, focused on students' attitudes toward reading in English and their perceptions of their ability to read academic English.
Results show that more than half of university students express negative attitudes toward reading in English. These attitudes include fear, anxiety, panic and stress, but also that reading in English is considerably more time-consuming than reading in Swedish. Students in both groups further report trying to avoid reading in English, and as many as 6% say they give up reading when they are confronted with a single word they do not understand. The results further show that university students perceive academic reading in English to be more difficult than upper secondary school students. For example, 37% of university students say reading in English is 'quite difficult' or 'very difficult' compared to 25% of upper secondary school students. Higher education institutions depend on upper secondary schools to provide students with the necessary English language skills for further education, but in this presentation, I will argue that students' negative attitudes are in part caused by a lack of preparation for reading academic English in upper secondary schools in Sweden.