Swedish Writing Exercises Assisted by Translation Software: A Case Study With a Japanese Learner

Abstract

This study examined the benefits of writing exercises assisted by translation software for learning Swedish. The participant was a Japanese individual, an advanced-level English and French speaker, and an intermediate-level German user. Prior to the survey, he had taught himself Swedish for several months. He wrote 15 texts and received feedback from a native Swedish speaker after every exercise. To assess his progress, two tests were conducted. The first test included 100 fundamental Swedish words, and the second questioned the present, past, and passive forms of 50 verbs. He had known 30 out of the 100 words before the research, but correctly identified 97 after completion. Moreover, the participant correctly answered only 49 out of the 150 verb forms at first, but the writing practice enabled him to identify 144 forms correctly. From the abovementioned results, this study concludes that the writing exercises efficiently enrich the lexical and grammatical knowledge of Japanese learners of Swedish.