The Swedish National Agency for Education encourages the exclusive use of the target language (TL) in the English language classrooms. However, one may question if this is observed, as the Swedish Schools Inspectorate, in their qualitative investigation of the Swedish schools, headlined the section on language use in their observation of English lessons in the years 6-9 as “too much English in Swedish”. They found that nearly half the lessons failed to provide sufficient opportunities for pupils’ communicative competence to develop and problematized this partly as a result of lack of pedagogical training among teachers. Nonetheless, the role of the first language (L1) in the foreign language classroom is controversial. Some favor an exclusion of the L1 while others believe the L1 has an important role. This essay problematizes four English teachers’ language choices in the classroom, with the theoretical approaches that the TL should be used extensively, but that neither teachers nor pupils should be prohibited from using the L1 as it can serve important purposes and facilitate language learning if used strategically. In this study, four English teachers were interviewed to investigate what determines their language choices. It was found that while teachers primarily based their language choices on pedagogical views and knowledge about language learning, for some the choice of language was not always strategic or pedagogical. In this study, the reasons for both their strategical and inadvertent uses are investigated. This study also investigated how the teachers perceive the pupils’ language choices, and what implications these perceptions may have.