Björn Hagström

PhD student at the Department of Culture, Languages and Media, Malmö University

I am a certified teacher and have taught Swedish, Swedish as Second Language and English in secondary school (grades 7-9) for 15 years. For the last 11 years, I have been affiliated with the Faculty of Education and society at Malmö University, and for the past seven years, I worked fulltime in teacher trainee programmes for Swedish and Swedish as a Second Language with a didactic focus.

I am interested in multilingual students: they need to develop basic literacy in the target language at the same time as they encounter different subjects and languages. Many multilingual students are newly arrived students aged 16-19 who study at language introductory schools. What characterises language introductory schools is that it is a heterogeneous group of students with highly diverse educational needs and varying schooling backgrounds. Despite the increasing number of students in this programme, how the learning best remains under-researched. My particular area of interest is examining in what ways teachers may utilise students’ resources and strengthen their self-confidence for future studies in Sweden. During my PhD studies, I want to explore teachers' didactic approaches to academic writing and incorporation of fiction and non-fiction in the subject of Social Sciences.

In my free-time I like working in the garden and walking in the forest.