Abstract

Swedish tuition for immigrants (SFI) is a public adult education program in Sweden that was created in order to provide the immigrants with basic skills in Swedish. People with different backgrounds speaking different languages learn together how they should communicate in Swedish, both orally and in writing. For those who teach SFI it is important to know which factors have positive effects on the Swedish language acquisition. One of the questions to be asked is if the learning materials´ genre has any effect on the SFI students´ proficiency, in particular, oral proficiency. Scientists as von Franz, Vygotskiy and Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, as a genre consciously or subconsciously recognizable by all the people, present texts that are easy to acqiure. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the students´ oral output would show a better use of the Swedish grammar having been learned if the text to be retell is a fairy tale. Ten SFI intermediate students retelled a fairy tale, a short novel and a text based on facts. Three grammar features were tested. The results show that the fairy tale as a genre did not improve the learners oral output concerning morphology and syntax, but did improve their word order. In general, the results show that a choice of genre does have effects on the grammar acquisition of the learners of Swedish, which can be futher researched and used in teaching practice.

Key words: fairy tale, genre, grammar, learning, oral proficiency, second language acquisition