Controversial topics and teacher answerability in Swedish for immigrants classes for refugees.

Highlights • Second language teachers working with refugee students face unique challenges. • Dialogic answerability provides a framework for teachers' choices around controversial topics. • Teachers are answerable to society and to students' cultural selves and future selves. • Controversial topics linked to past conflict and trauma tend to be avoided. • Topics linked to strong societal values tend to be included, despite their controversy. Abstract This paper uses a dialogic framework to analyse how teachers of Swedish as a second language to adult refugee learners in Sweden position themselves in terms of both planned and contingent approaches in the classroom in relation to values teaching and controversial topics. The paper draws on a narrative study which explored the stances of five Swedish for Immigrants teachers in relation to problematic topics through the use of narrative frames, picture prompts and interviews. Findings from the study suggest that teachers' choices to engage with or avoid values teaching and controversial topics can best be understood in terms of dialogic answerability, namely a moral responsiveness and responsibility to students as well as to the host society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]