English first

Abstract

This case study explores the questions of how national and local education policies address languages of instruction for a Swedish compulsory school offering English-medium instruction (hereafter EMI) as well as how these policies are interpreted and implemented in practice. Critical discourse analysis provides a framework for examining the relationship between stated and enacted policies at the various institutional levels. Methods from linguistic ethnography yielded rich data including classroom observations, interviews, and artifact collection over a period of three school years in grades four through six. Findings from the study reveal discourses of language hierarchies, a native speaker ideal privileging English and practices that reflect varying degrees of language separation. While Swedish is occasionally used to support English-medium content learning, there is little space for students’ mother tongues in the mainstream classroom. The findings from this study have implications for how stakeholders may put language-in-education policies into practice in EMI programs.