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The aim of the study presented here, is to examine how concepts concerning language, identity and learning are oriented towards at different levels covering contemporary Swedish language policy, syllabi, and interaction in language focused classrooms. Taking nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) as a point of departure, our interest here is not in the implementation of policy, but rather on how cycles of discourses are constituted and used in classroom spaces or “practiced language policy” (Bonacina, 2011) . Thus and in line with sociocultural perspectives, nexus analysis takes its point of departure in social action as a unit of analysis while at the same time including the wider socio-historical discourses intersecting in that specific unit of social action. 

The study presented is part of the ongoing research in project-CIC, Categorization of Identities and Communication. Project-CIC is interested in both the social practices and the discourses that frame a tailored education for adult immigrants in Sweden. The empirical material used in the present study encompasses historical archive material including curricula, commission reports, public inquiries, political propositions, laws, as well as approximately 95 hours of audio and video materials and ethnographic field notes from two different classroom settings at an institutional arena called Swedish for immigrants (Sfi).

In line with the theoretical framework, we scrutinize the discourses in place formulated at the national geopolitical level in terms of language policy and course syllabi, continuing to the organization of time and space in the classroom and finally to the micro level social interaction in specific classrooms. In the Swedish Language Act (2009) Swedish is framed as “the principal language in Sweden”. This law also decrees that “all residents of Sweden are to be given the opportunity to learn, develop and use Swedish” and that persons with ‘”a different mother tongue” are to be “given the opportunity to develop and use their mother tongue”. By illustrating different “ways of being” and different “ways with words” from classroom settings, we explore how the principle of Swedish as the main and uniting language in the political space of Sweden, as formulated in the Language Act, is transformed and contested through the actions that take place in the language learning classroom. Our analysis highlights a nexus of different interaction orders where recognition (or non-recognition) of the historical bodies of the students and use of the discourses in place have been identified with regards to the organization of time and space in a specific adult learning context. The social practices in the project classrooms do not merely constitute spaces where syllabi and language policy are implemented but rather they are contexts where discourses, historical bodies and interaction orders intersect. Hence, our analysis highlights how language focused classrooms are spaces of practiced language policy

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Bonacina, F. (2011). A Conversation Analytic Approach to Practiced Language Policies: The example of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France. http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/5268/2/Bonacina2011.pdf

Scollon R. & Scollon S. (2004). Nexus analysis: discourse and the emerging Internet. London: Routledge.