Research group
Interaction and Multilingualism (Interfler)
Interfler is one of the regular research groups in the section Swedish and Scandinavian Languages in the Department of Swedish and Multilingualism. The group consists of researchers with interests in interaction and multilingualism, both in everyday life and different public domains such as education and working life.
Photo: Arne Trautmann, MostPhotos
The research group focuses on how people act and communicate in authentic situations with the resources they have at their disposal – various languages and multimodal resources. These include spoken and written language as well as digital and embodied expressions. The researchers often base their investigations on recorded data and observations on site. Current projects involve e.g., multilingual workplaces, language cafés for recent migrants, minority language instruction, as well as Swedish in everyday situations, such as service encounters. The researchers apply a range of theories and methods, including interactional sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis (CA), multimodal interaction analysis, linguistic ethnography, social semiotics and discourse analysis.
Group members
Group managers
Mona Blåsjö
Professor
The Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism
Learning with robots? The project aims to explore how we can use and benefit from human-robot interaction in adult education in Sweden, with special focus on students with Swedish as a second language.
Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages – Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish is a research programme by partners Stockholm University, University of Helsinki , University of Turku and the Institute for Language and Folklore in Gothenburg.
This project explores linguistic and institutional dynamics in multilingual workplaces, examining interactional practices and identity construction. Using audio/video data, it focuses on backstage talk, leadership, and socio-technical practices in manager-employee meetings, employing EMCA, MCA, and socio-technical methods.
The project focuses on internationally trained teachers and pre-school teachers and their experience and view of communication and language use in their work in Sweden. Their experience derives from their supplementary education (ULV) at universities in Sweden, and from their work as teachers in different parts of the Swedish school system.
This project investigates minority language education in two parallel educational settings in Sweden: mother tongue tuition (MTT), which forms part of the national curriculum, and the teaching of language and culture in complementary schools, organized by local communities.
Professional Communication and Digital Media. Complexity, Mobility and Multilingualism in the Global Workplace. The project studies communication in commercial enterprises, with a focus on digital media, multilingualism and internal communication.
How did communication specialists in Swedish municipalities work during the covid-19-pandemic? What did they learn that could be of use in future crisis?
The project ”The language café as a social venue and a space”for language training offers insights into the support provided by the civil society to the integration of adults, particularly in terms of offering non-formal, social settings for language practicing.
In the citizen science project “What do the school walls say” teachers and students will help scholars to investigate how the school system’s democratic mission is reflected in the signs, notes and messages on classroom walls, in corridors and other public spaces of schools.
News
Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism
Communication professionals have a paramount role in global crisis. What did they learn during the covid pandemic that could be used in future global crisis? In an article, Mats Landqvist and Mona Blåsjö identifies and analyzes strategy changes among communicators in municipalities and how their conceptions of communicated knowledge transformed during the pandemic.
