This entry reviews the history, functions and features of English in Slovenia, as well as current debates. Slovenia is an Expanding Circle country where, although there is a good level of societal knowledge of English, English is still a foreign language. While English is used in several domains, such as higher education, scientific publishing, shop signs, advertising and the workplace, the use of English is limited by legislation in many of these domains. English is a language of modernity and cosmopolitanism in Slovenia, so Slovene youth use English for expressive and emotive purposes, and watch and listen to the media in English. The spread of English in Slovenia has, however, been the subject of fierce debates, as some see it as a threat to the Slovene language.

This entry reviews the history and contemporary functions and features of English in Sweden and shows that English has made great inroads into many aspects of Swedish society, such as education, as well as working and private life. Today all Swedes learn English and many also study through the medium of English and use English at work. English has a big presence in the linguistic landscape of Sweden and Swedes' leisure and entertainment activities. However, following the rapid spread of English in Sweden in the last few decades, debates have arisen focusing on the effect of English on Swedish and society as a whole. Nevertheless, although English is ubiquitous in Sweden, Sweden should still be considered an Expanding Circle country.

English has for a long time had a strong position in the Swedish sociolinguistic context. English is ubiquitous in the contemporary Swedish public sphere, and good knowledge of English can be found in all sections of society. Far from only being used as a lingua franca for international communication, English is today also pervasively used in domains of business, higher education and academia, as well as in the media and for entertainment purposes. This growing presence of English in Sweden has led to language debates about the status and the role of English in Sweden and concerns of whether English is a threat to Swedish. This article discusses the status and the manifold functions of English in Sweden and describes the uses and features of English in the Swedish context. It concludes with a discussion of the current debates on the uses and the role of English in Sweden.

This chapter provides an overview of the background of English-medium instruction (EMI) in the Scandinavian region. While there are different views on what the Scandinavian region covers geographically, for our present purposes, we include, alphabetically, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. In our overview, we will touch upon some important differences that these four countries have despite the frequent discussion of the homogenous nature of these countries. Among these differences are the status of the local languages, the history of higher education, and the different implementations of EMI, which we believe are important. In search for a better and more nuanced understanding of EMI in the region, we will discuss the development and expansion of EMI in Scandinavian higher education and draw some conclusions on the differences and similarities that emerge from our review. We also argue that we need continued, fine-tuned research that carefully considers the histories and current sociolinguistic realities of these countries, thereby explaining the many faces of EMI in this geographical region.

As English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) continues to expand across the globe, there is a glaring absence of research on assessment. This article reviews the scarce literature to date and maps out a research agenda for the future. Drawing on Shohamy’s (2001, 2007) Critical Language Testing and McNamara et al.’s (2019) notions of “fair” and “just” language assessment, our reading of the literature to date is that it has revealed considerable complexities around implementing assessment in EMI contexts, with key questions centring not only on what and who to assess but also on how and why assessment should take place. In outlining a research agenda for the future, we suggest that one way of bypassing such challenges may be to carve out a greater role for assessment for learning in higher education. This could capitalize on – and raise stakeholders’ awareness of – bodies of knowledge that are well established within applied linguistics about the integral role of language in learning. Whilst we acknowledge challenges in securing institutional buy-in for putting this agenda into practice, we suggest that doing so could turn assessment challenges into opportunities and significantly enhance learning not only in EMI contexts but beyond.

Student engagement and dialogue around writing are central to a genre-based academic writing pedagogy. These pedagogical principles are more difficult to achieve in emergency remote teaching such as the one imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden shift from face-to-face to online teaching required changes in course design. This chapter reports on the Swedish experience of teaching an interdisciplinary postgraduate EAP course during a period of emergency remote teaching and how what was learnt can be applied in the future. It describes how the university-wide implemented video conferencing tool and online learning platform were used in line with the pedagogical ethos of the course. While these tools provided a space for learning and synchronous and asynchronous communication, they also presented challenges in terms of the ability to interact spontaneously and the additional time needed to organize activities in a virtual learning environment. Cognizant of the opportunities and constraints of these tools, core elements of the course were redesigned through teacher collaboration and co-learning. This was done with the aim of better enabling student activity through small-group peer interaction and scaffolded peer feedback. These measures were intended to counteract the students’ sense of social isolation and help them feel a part of an academic community. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the lessons learnt could be used when returning to the classroom.

Research has shown that classroom-based reading strategy training does not necessarily result in effective, self-regulated reading behaviours when students engage with authentic academic reading in their own study contexts. In light of this problem, our study examines the effects of an instructional scaffold combined with teacher feedback, designed to foster students’ self-regulation in authentic academic reading contexts. Over a 5-week period, students read five academic texts and posted blog posts documenting their reading, scaffolded by a task prompt. In response, their teacher posted individualised feedback. The data comprised 75 student blog posts and 63 teacher responses. The results suggest that the task prompts and feedback supported students’ self-regulation in different ways: while the task prompted students to reflect on their reading, teacher feedback redirected students’ attention to new ways of reading and to less superficial aspects of the task, as well as reminding them of reading behaviours they had previously engaged in successfully. The study therefore provides insights into the interplay between task and feedback and recommendations for teaching practice.

Over the years, research on writing has increasingly emphasized the value of adopting a sociocultural perspective to understand how social context and social interaction relate to writing regulation. Using the theoretical lens of participatory appropriation, this study investigates the self-regulatory behavior of three successful Bachelor essay writers in literature, and how the interaction with their supervisors supported students’ development of writing regulation in disciplinary-relevant ways. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews at three key moments in the term; Pintrich’s self-regulation framework was used as coding heuristic to trace participants’ self-regulation behavior over the term. Self-regulation data was cross-analyzed with data coded as participatory appropriation to identify the overlap between students’ self-regulation of writing and their social experiences, especially the dialogue with their supervisors. Our results show how the supervisors acted as agents of socialization, providing frames for adoption of disciplinary-relevant ways of thinking and doing, as well as indirectly sustaining the students’ motivation and re-conceptualization of the writing experience. Overall, this investigation responds to calls for inquiries of self-regulation against the backdrop of the social context in which it is embedded.

This study investigates the uses and functions of laughter and humour in a corpus of nine PhD defences/vivas. The data include the PhD defences in their entirety, including monologic and dialogic talk by participants from a variety of research cultures. The defences were video-recorded and transcribed, and laughter episodes analysed according to who laughed, who the source of “the laughable” was, what the reason for laughing was and at what point laughter occurred. The analysis reveals that a majority of laughter was non-humorous, produced by one person, and had the function of mitigating face threats to speakers and others. Humorous laughter was usually produced by more than one person and had the function of relieving tension, creating a non-adversarial atmosphere and building a community. These results are connected to the communicative purposes of the participants; the participants’ mutual aim is to examine an academic work and confirm the candidate’s membership in their chosen specialisation, which requires cooperation from all parties. Furthermore, although the participants come from different research cultures where humour can have a different presence and function, this study shows that laughter and humour are frequent and fill an important function in ELF interactions in high-stakes academic situations.

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.