Disjuncts in teaching Swedish — a coursebook analysis

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of a coursebook in Swedish for foreign language learners with a focus on information concerning disjuncts. Krashen’s input hypothesis is used as a basic assumption, which states that the development of language skills in a second language anticipates an understandable input on a level that is one step higher than the learner’s current level. The analysis involves the textbook and student’s book Rivstart at the B1+B2 level. In the study, a variety of disjuncts were considered as well as their position in a sentence (main clause versus subordinate clause) since Swedish word order requires different locations of this item in both clause types. In addition, the explicit and the implicit use of disjuncts were analysed in both books. The results indicated that both the textbook and the student’s book use a wide span of different disjuncts. The explicit mention of disjuncts is more common in the student’s book than in the textbook, but the focus is almost often on the meaning and not on the syntactic position. The implicit occurrence, on the other hand, is more frequent in the textbook than in the student’s book. There is a considerable discrepancy in the use of disjuncts in main and subordinate clauses. Disjuncts occur almost only in main clauses — the learners become accustomed to a very limited input of disjuncts in subordinate clauses which causes a substantial underrepresentation of constructions with preverbal position and a disjunct in subordinate clauses in Swedish.