I mainly teach in the areas of phonetics/pronunciation, sociolinguistics and grammar.

I also supervise bachelor theses in the department.

My research interests concern the school environment, the spoken language of adolescents (first and second language), and standard language ideologies (in particular adolescents' views on these and the effect on spoken language).

From 2022 I'm participating in the project Samsyn.

2021-2022 I'm working in the project Samsas.

2020 I received funding from the Erik Wellander foundation to work on a project on pronunciation, language ideology and language norms among pupils with Swedish as a first or second language.

During 2018-2020 I worked in the project Intensive education in Swedish for newly arrived pupils (Intensivsvenska), which aimed to promote integration of newly arrived pupils of secondary and upper secondary ages by developing and applying a model for education and teaching which increases the opportunities for these pupils to move forward in the educational system and/or their working life, within realistic and reasonable time frames.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• English Phonology in a Globalized World: Challenging Native Speakerism through Listener Training in Universities in Sweden and the US

  2022. Hyeseung Jeong, Stephanie Lindemann, Julia Forsberg. Recherches anglaises et nord américaines 55, 135-153

  Article

  English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonological processing is ‘a two-way street’ involving both speaker and listener. Thus, pronunciation instruction in this globalized time needs to be complemented with ways to help listeners understand a wide range of accents, thereby challenging the native speakerism and standard language ideology of more traditional English teaching. In this paper, we share our experiences of promoting listener abilities in university courses in Sweden and the US, two very different teaching contexts. In Sweden, Jeong takes a truly phonetic approach, starting from students’ own pronunciations rather than a ‘standard’ model, and focuses on ability to comprehend diverse accents. In the US, Lindemann uses native-speaking students’ complaints about supposedly incomprehensible instructors, not as justification for further training of instructors who are already proficient English users, but as an opportunity to offer listener training to the students. Put together, these experiences provide a basis for Forsberg’s reflection on the teaching of L2 phonetics and pronunciation in other languages such as Swedish, and the benefits of shifting some of the focus from speaker to listener in order to begin to overcome native speakerism and standard language ideology.

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• Standard language ideology in the English language classroom: Suggestions for EIL- informed teacher education

  2022. Sandra Jansen, Susanne Mohr, Julia Forsberg. Glocalising Teaching English as an International Language, 63-82

  Chapter

  In recent years many researchers have called for an English as an International Language (EIL) perspective to be considered in contemporary English Language Teaching (ELT) (cf. e.g., Galloway & Rose, 2015). However, adding a new lesson or component on EIL to an existing program is not enough. What is needed is a complete revision of the entire program, using one’s understanding of the use of English in international contexts as a foundation that underpins every single aspect of the curriculum. It entails a major overhaul, but a much-needed one (Matsuda & Friedrich, 2012, p. 25). Implementing profound changes to the curriculum is a first step towards including an EIL perspective, but in this chapter, we argue that a significant change in thought patterns concerning Standard Language Ideology (SLI) among teachers needs to take place as well in order to bring about a successful shift in perspective. We discuss a number of sociolinguistic topics which are relevant in this context that might have been overlooked so far and provide a number of practical suggestions for university courses which focus on English linguistics in the classroom.

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• Self-assessment and standard language ideologies

  2020. Julia Forsberg, Maria Therese Ribbås, Johan Gross. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

  Article

  Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews where 111 participants self-assess their Swedish, English and additional home languages. During the self-assessment, participants use different points of reference when reflecting on the different languages in their repertoires. Four main categories of answers are found, all relating to an absent referee in some manner: the participants’ evaluations of other people’s language proficiency compared to their own; their proficiency in other languages; their evaluation of their proficiency in relation to formal grading and feedback given in school; and their own experiences of their limitations and abilities in different situations. When assessing Swedish, participants display attitudes towards ‘good’ and ‘bad’ language and contextualise their proficiency in a way that focuses on standard language ideologies and their speech community. The same pattern does not occur when participants reflect on their other languages, indicating the important role that the peer group and speech community have in creating and facilitating these ideologies.

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• European English in the EFL classroom? Teacher attitudes towards target varieties of English in Sweden and Germany

  2019. Susanne Mohr, Sandra Jansen, Julia Forsberg. English Today

  Article

  The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.

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• Litterarisering – diagnostisering av nyanlända

  2020. Tomas Riad, Julia Forsberg. Svenskans beskrivning 37, 267-281

  Conference

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• A broader view of pronunciation

  2021. Julia Forsberg, Tomas Riad, Maria Lim Falk.

  Conference

  Traditional pronunciation instruction primarily involves articulation and listening comprehension. We argue that this is too narrow a view of what role pronunciation should play in the education of speakers of Swedish as a second language. Pronunciation should be directly concerned with the literarisation of learners, directed at the development of coding and decoding skills associated with all of reading, writing, listening and speaking. 

  Diagnostic tests given within the development project Intensivsvenska (IntensiveSwedish) show that there are often lingering problems at the basic literacy level for second language learners (age 16–19), even after three years of courses in Swedish as a second language. This holds even when the students are literate in their first language. In fact, it is commonly the case that immigrants never acquire some of the phonological distinctions of the Swedish sound system and their attendant correspondences in the (alphabetic) orthographic system. Typical exponents of this are the distinctions between /y/ and /i/ or /ø/ and /e/ (both long and short), the distinction between long and short consonants (mata vs. matta, lada vs. ladda, etc.), and the connection to the sound referents of letters <å, ä, ö. u>. Decoding issues like these can be addressed by combining pronunciation training with literarisation training.

  We hypothesise that the reasons why many students remain poor readers even after several years in the Swedish school system is that phonological distinctions are not acquired and that students are unsure of the relationship between phonology and orthography. If unaddressed, deficient decoding abilities may in turn hamper the development of sight reading, and more generally limit the amount of information that the students can absorb from reading, since much of the energy will be taken up by decoding efforts. A better balance between the broader view of pronunciation and reading for content may resolve problems caused by insufficient literarisation.

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Show all publications by Julia Backelin Forsberg at Stockholm University