The present study focuses on second language use as communicative strategies in the language learning environment of an English-medium content and language integrated learning (CLIL) workshop at an auto mechanics class in a Swedish upper secondary school. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a Vehicle engineering program taught in and through a foreign language; English.
The settings of Swedish schools of auto mechanics have recently been defined in various studies as a very rich soil for researchers to dig deeper into issues of language, learning and the productions of identities due to the very rapid changes undergone by the program in the last decade (cf. Nehls, 2003; Rosvall, 2011). Traditionally the students of auto mechanics in Sweden have leaned heavily on very normative masculine understandings of what learning in school in general is and specifically manifested in a disinterest in second language learning (Beach et. al., 1999). These former expectations of and among students of auto mechanics have been questioned lately by findings in recent research (Korp, 2011; Rosvall, 2011).
The analyses concern how and in what ways a certain second language lexical is transformed from teacher-impelled learnables, into the use of complex understandings and as actual professional practice, and how this can be seen to play an important role in building an English-speaking classroom community of becoming professionals of bilingual auto mechanics.
A linguistic ethnographic approach (Rampton, 2007;2011) is taken in order to explore how teachers' and students’ second language teaching and learning activities are organized to invoke language ideologies. It is found that teachers introduce the lexical item as a way of co-constructing shifts between different second language registers linked to classroom language ideologies. It is here argued that engaging in these lexical learning trajectories should be seen as conditional for language learning and peer group participation at the English medium instruction Vehicle programme.
The study also demonstrates that second language learning in vocational CLIL classrooms is orderly, it is related to the evolution of communicative strategies, and it is in accordance with and reproduces local language norms, often made explicit by humorous interaction.
