Soundtrack till framgång? : Musik som didaktiskt verktyg för svenskundervisningen i mellanstadiet

Sammanfattning: The basis for our study has been to identify how teachers implement music in their language teaching and if there are any benefits to be seen. We have identified that during our own studies, much of the scientific research that has been made available to us regarding this subject has been aimed and performed on younger students; ages three to eight. This led us to take interest in if middle-school teachers can use similar methods of music-implemented language teaching to further facilitate the learning of students in ages nine to twelve. When looking for previously relevant studies we found a gap in research material regarding said ages which prompted us to conduct our own for this study. To identify this, we focused on two questions; How do teachers describe their application of music in connection with Swedish teaching? and What importance do teachers attribute to music as a didactic tool in Swedish teaching?   The study is based on the sociocultural perspective considering music in the classroom often occurs in groups and through social interaction between students. We have focused on using the concepts: mediation, the zone of proximal development and multimodality in our analysis. To answer our two questions, we conducted four semi-structured interviews with teachers from four different regions in Sweden. Our qualitative analysis showed that the teachers can identify advantages in learning processes related to using music in their language teaching that is bound to word comprehension, vocabulary, and pronunciation. They also pinpoint the value of students' identity building when working with music in relation to language teaching in the classroom.