Student ambivalence toward second language education in three Swedish upper secondary schools

•SSL may be associated with negative societal discourses on immigration and L2 use.•The pedagogical affordances of SSL are interpreted as reasons for continuing in SSL.•The importance of considering local educational contexts and ideologies is emphasized. This paper explores the relatively unique educational design of the school subject Swedish as a second language (SSL) through ethnographic fieldwork in three linguistically diverse schools in Sweden. A main point is the importance of carefully considering the local educational context in relation to its organizational design and embeddedness in language ideologies and linguistic hierarchies when researching and discussing educational practices designed for linguistically and culturally diverse students. Since L2 education22The term second language (L2) is used throughout the article in accordance with the terminology of the language education policy in Sweden. may become part of a negative social categorization of students (e.g. Talmy, 2011), we focus on student perspectives, i.e. 15 students’ narrated experiences of SSL in upper secondary schools where SSL is a voluntary subject33Students must, however, choose between one of the two parallel subjects Swedish or Swedish as a second language. and the teachers are highly qualified. On the basis of stance analysis (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009), we discuss both the students’ motives for choosing SSL and their reasons for continuing to study SSL. Findings show an ambivalence toward the subject, which is related to conflicting discourses surrounding it (Hedman & Magnusson, 2018). On the one hand, the narratives reflect that SSL may be associated with negative societal discourses on immigration and L2 use; on the other, they provide examples of affordances of SSL, i.e. counter images to these discourses (cf. contrastive insights, Hymes, 1996). Not least, pedagogical scaffolding of advanced content was analyzed as a main reward. The fact that attending SSL in these schools was not an exception, separating a few from the majority, also allows for a problematization of “mainstream”.