English for academic purposes at Swedish universities: Teachers' objectives and practices

In a parallel-language environment the use of textbooks in English in coursesotherwise in the local language is naturalized and not widely discussed orquestioned. The aim of this study was to elicit the attitudes and syllabusinfrastructure that underlie the practice. A large-scale survey was carried out andanswers were obtained from over 20% of teachers at Swedish universities.Results confirmed that a majority regarded English as important during and/orafter university studies and showed that they considered the use of Englishlanguagetextbooks as providing a useful opportunity for incidental languagelearning. In strong contrast to the situation in a content and language integratedlearning environment, only a small minority of courses were reported to haveany specified learning outcome related to English. Open answers showedawareness of the benefits and risks of parallel-language practices, but no interestin making aims explicit. In our view, there is no contradiction between incidentallearning and explicit aims, and course aims which remain implicit make rationalplanning and constructive alignment more difficult. They also inhibit discussionof appropriate methodology.