“I don’t teach language”

Abstract

From a disciplinary discourse perspective, all university courses can be said to involve content and language integrated learning (CLIL) even in monolingual settings. Clearly, however, things become much more complex when two or more languages are involved in teaching and learning. The aim of this paper is to introduce readers to the linguistic situation in Swedish universities, where two languages - English and Swedish - are commonly used in the teaching and learning of a number of disciplines. The paper describes the linguistic landscape of Swedish higher education and presents an illustrative case study from a single discipline (physics) with a hierarchical knowledge structure (Bernstein 1999). Semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten physics lecturers from four Swedish universities. The lecturers were asked about their disciplinary language-learning expectations for their students. These interviews were analysed using qualitative methods inspired by the phenomenographic approach. Six main themes resulting from the analysis are presented and discussed. From a CLIL perspective, one recurring theme is that none of the lecturers saw themselves as teachers of disciplinary Swedish or English. The paper concludes by discussing the generalizability of the findings to other disciplines with similar (hierarchical) knowledge structures.