Learning by Talking : Comprehending and Analysing the Pupils’ Thoughts and Experiences about Speaking English for Second Language Acquisition

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to find out the pupils’ thoughts and experiences about speakingEnglish for second language acquisition in upper secondary school. We want to establish thatoral communication is an important factor towards fulfilling the criteria to strive for indeveloping the pupils’ knowledge and skills in language learning according to the Curriculumfor Compulsory School System (Skolverket, 2006) and the Syllabus for the English Subject(Skolverket, 2001).The background presents theoretical approaches in second language acquisition, such asVygostskij’s, Piaget’s and Krashen’s theories of language acquisition. Communicativecompetence, affective factors, strategies and speech-codes used in the learning process havealso been briefly described in this study.The methods used for collecting data were observations and interviews, with a qualitativesurvey and hermeneutic approach in focus. The research took place in three different schoolsin a municipality in southwest of Sweden. For the observations, there were 71 pupilsparticipating in this study and 37 pupils wanted to collaborate for the interviews. No teacheror school workers were involved or participated in the observations or interviews. We wantedto keep the pupils’ point of view about how they use verbal language skills in English to gainknowledge about the target language.