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Although it is widely recognised by language teachers that the use of musical activities supports language development in both children and adults, studies show that teachers do not use them as much as they would like. This gap can be disadvantageous to both learners and teachers. The purpose of this study was to collect examples of music activities that actually take place and are regarded as beneficial for language development in Spanish in a Swedish school context, and what conditions are central to them being used. The study is based on a survey and follow-up interviews with Spanish teachers, and the results show that a wide variety of activities are used, both with a focus on communicative and cultural competences, and on providing stimulating settings for learning. This high level of use suggests a smaller gap between teachers' beliefs and practices compared to previous studies, possibly indicating that music has a more prominent place in the Spanish classroom than in other foreign language classrooms. The choice of music for the learning activity emerged as a particularly important factor for the activity to work as intended., Olika typer av musikaktiviteter kan gynna språkutvecklingen för såväl barn som vuxna, men flera studier visar att lärare inte använder dem i den utsträckning de skulle vilja. Detta glapp kan vara till nackdel för både inlärare och lärare. Syftet med denna studie var att samla exempel på musikaktiviteter som faktiskt blir av och bedöms fungera positivt för språkutveckling i spanska i svensk skolkontext, och vilka förutsättningar som är centrala för att detta ska ske. Studien baserar sig på enkätsvar och uppföljande intervjuer med spanskalärare, och resultaten visar att en stor variation av aktiviteter används både med fokus på kommunikativa och kulturella kompetenser, och för att främja förutsättningarna för lärande. Denna höga användning tyder på ett mindre glapp mellan övertygelse och praktik inom just spanskämnet, vilket kan tyda på att musik har en mer given plats i spanskaklassrummet än i andra språkämnen. Musikval framstår som en särskilt viktig faktor för att aktiviteten ska fungera med avsedd effekt.

In this paper, the findings from a qualitative analysis of student and teacher interviews following an online Japanese-Swedish tandem exchange in 2020 will be discussed. The main aim was to explore what students and teachers had valued in the exchange, and to connect these values to the theoretical principles of reciprocity and autonomy in the tandem learning model (Little & Brammerts 1996). The results show that students valued reciprocal aspects, focusing on personal peer-to-peer experiences and the opportunity for natural language use, while teachers valued linguistic development, and seemed to implicitly assume a high degree of autonomy to be in place from the start, rather than it being developed or expanded underway. The findings are viewed in the light of the students’ rather different cultural-educational frames and add to building a more global perspective on tandem exchange, which has hitherto been dominated by data from European and American contexts (Lewis & O’Dowd 2016).

This qualitative study aims to describe some interactional uses of öh [ø], a commonly used particle both in Italian and in other Italian-Romance varieties, from the perspective of conversation analysis (Schegloff, 2007). The research is based on a corpus of 59 instances from informal phone calls between friends, face-to-face conversations, and interviews in standard and regional Italian. The analysis shows that öh appears in responsive turns both as a free-standing turn-constructional unit and as a turn preface, either alone or in combination with other words. In the sequential context analyzed here - the response to a polar question, a B-event statement (i.e., a statement that indicate privileged, first-hand knowledge to a topic by the interlocutor, and which is usually treated as request for confirmation; cf. Labov and Fanshel, 1977: 100) or other types of informational turns - öh is used by participants to confirm from an epistemically qualified position. Finally, öh can take on distinct prosodic contours, lending itself to remarkable modulations that can emphasize the participant’s stance (cf. Gardner 2001).