Teaching in Swedish for non-native Swedish speakers – Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Teaching in a non-native language always has its own challenge and difficulty, especially with the concept of the quality of knowledge transfer and skills and confidence in teaching. In this work, we highlight these challenges by interviewing lecturers who have been experiencing teaching in Swedish as their non-native language. . We chose non-native Swedish lectures teaching in Swedish as our target group since it is very probable that soon or late we, as non-Swedish lecturers, would be asked to teach in Swedish. The interview outcome is described, and then a qualitative study of those interviews is performed. The interviewed participants’ experience can be used as a guide for those who eventually will teach in Swedish for the first time. We conclude that teaching in Swedish is a stressful task for most non-native Swedish speakers, but several advantages outweigh this. One of them is increased communication between teacher and student due to a minor language barrier on the student side.