This article explores the ways in which the results of language analyses were taken into account when Swedish Migration Agency (SMA) case officers built arguments concerning unaccompanied children's countries of origin. The research literature on LADO has primarily commented on risks of unreliability. Data was drawn from one calendar year of asylum decisions concerning unaccompanied children, and the sample where LADO had been conducted was analysed by qualitative thematic analysis. The main finding indicates that LADO is primarily used as an enhancer of other circumstances present in the asylum case, which means that it has the potential to 'tip the scales' into approval or rejection. The findings also suggest that case officers use the results of LADO in different ways to regulate the issue of credibility depending on the political and geographical dynamics in the children's reported countries of origin. The practical implications are that migration authorities should regularly examine to what extent the results of LADO are given weight in asylum case processing and that the influence of LADO results on individual decisions should be comprehensively explained in child consequence analyses.

Four different interaction styles for the social robot Furhat acting as a host in spoken conversation practice with two simultaneous language learners have been developed, based on interaction styles of human moderators of language cafés. We first investigated, through a survey and recorded sessions of three-party language café style conversations, how the interaction styles of human moderators are influenced by different factors (e.g., the participants language level and familiarity). Using this knowledge, four distinct interaction styles were developed for the robot: sequentially asking one participant questions at the time (Interviewer); the robot speaking about itself, robots and Sweden or asking quiz questions about Sweden (Narrator); attempting to make the participants talk with each other (Facilitator); and trying to establish a three-party robot–learner– learner interaction with equal participation (Interlocutor). A user study with 32 participants, conversing in pairs with the robot, was carried out to investigate how the post-session ratings of the robot’s behavior along different dimensions (e.g., the robot’s conversational skills and friendliness, the value of practice) are influenced by the robot’s interaction style and participant variables (e.g., level in the target language, gender, origin). The general findings were that Interviewer received the highest mean rating, but that different factors influenced the ratings substantially, indicating that the preference of individual participants needs to be anticipated in order to improve learner satisfaction with the practice. We conclude with a list of recommendations for robot-hosted conversation practice in a second language.

Jypp, Dompa and Jackson Pollock: Narratives on place, urbanvernaculars, and upper class at a prestigious upper secondaryschool.

Labelling a linguistic style by appointing it to certain groupsof speakers and where they live can be a deeply problematic enterpriseas both identities, language use and space become fixed and limited. InSweden the speech style called Rinkeby Swedish (RS) has become an icon of ethnic Otherness, educational failure, and of an aggressive sexist and homophobic masculinity – ascribed to a fixed locality in the outskirtsof the big cities. In this paper we have turned our gaze towards a place that have typically not been associated with RS before: a Stockholm elite school. The analysis reveals how a group of students, illustrated by how the participant Wille, perform authenticity and indexically anchor their linguistic practices and epistemics in various linguistic contexts. In a case study, we explore how the participants talk about and use, not one but many different linguistic styles. We argue that the participants employ these styles as resources to comment on locality as well as social hierarchies in the school and the society at large.

In Swedish schools, newly arrived refugee and immigrant students are provided with a language introductory programme, designed for integration into the mainstream school system. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork on classroom conversations in one such introductory programme, this study analyses how Swedish as second language (SSL) students are positioned and position themselves in everyday discursive practices. The participants strive to qualify for mainstream programmes through performing a ‘regular’ student identity. Although educational aim and the students’ investments coincide, in doing the inclusive school, the institution calls for the students to perform ethnicity. The student identities thus emerge in and through a cluster of performative effects of how they are addressed by the school as ‘ethnic’ students, and how they manage those very positionings. Paradoxically, an institutional construction of an inclusive school draws on a discourse of Otherness in which the student’s voices are invited but seem to be ignored.

Much research on classroom talk has had a dyadic teacher-student bias. This study documents multiparty aspects of repair work through analyses of talk in a classroom community. Drawing on 40h of video-recordings from Swedish L2 lessons in a language immersion classroom, participant contributions were analyzed as those of a party (Schegloff, 1995), rather than merely as individual contributions. The detailed analyses of correction trajectories reveal that both the teacher and the students produced exposed corrections (Jefferson, 1987) as well as embedded corrections (corrective recasts). The analyses illuminate the teacher's sustained efforts in tailoring classroom talk to the classroom community's displayed understanding and varying skills, something that involved a continuous balancing act between form-accuracy and conversational progressivity. Moreover, the analyses document student agency (e.g. vicarious responses, chorus responses and peer corrections). In moving away from a dyadic bias, this study of repair work contributes to situated analyses of classroom corrections.

In a single-case analysis of classroom conversations, Swedish was both the target language and lingua franca. The analyses (based on a corpus of 40 h of video-recordings) document the role of stylizations and alignments in the building of a community of practice in a L2 classroom for migrant students. The analyses cover participants' perspectives as they appeared in their ways of deploying local registers, on the one hand, and standard Swedish, on the other. Stylizations and laughter were important resources for the establishment of local language ideologies. The analyses extend work on classroom performance and communities of practice, documenting in detail how a community is partly talked into being, shaped through stylizations and other alignments.

This dissertation examines classroom conversations involving refugee and immigrant youth in a second language (L2) introduction program, exploring how L2 Swedish emerges as a multiparty accomplishment by both the teacher and the students. Drawing on forty hours of video-recorded Swedish L2 classroom conversations, as well as on observations and informal interviews, it focuses on talk as a form of social action. Theoretically and methodologically, the dissertation primarily combines insights from language socialization and social constructionist frameworks and detailed transcriptions informed by conversation analysis.

Study I documents how schooled Swedish as a second language (SSL) student identities emerged as performative effects of how the students in school activities were addressed as “ethnic” students, and how they managed to handle, adopt, and contest being positioned as the Other. Study II records classroom performances and the formation of a community of practice. The analyses cover how students’ verbal improvisations (repetitions, stylizations, and laughter) and alignments to local registers authenticate SSL identities. The findings show how stylizations were important resources for metalinguistic reflections on correctness, and for the establishment of a local language ideology. Study III documents the interactional nature of classroom repair work. Detailed analyses of correction sequences and trajectories show that both the teacher and the students produced ambiguous other-corrections, illuminating the intricate multiparty work in correction trajectories.

In brief, this dissertation illuminates multiparty aspects of classroom L2 socialization. The analyses of classroom talk show how both teacher and student investments in language competencies and local ideologies of correct Swedish or style, as well as participation and identity work, are co-constructed through participants’ tailoring of talk.