14 DAY TRIAL // A licentiate thesis in English from the University of Gothenburg, concluded that because of the globalization process, in many Swedish companies that were sold to owners in other countries, employees are often forced to change their working language from Swedish to English.
Vivianne Apelman is the author of this thesis and she is also involved in language education at Chalmers University of Technology.
She says that her “results confirm previous findings pointing to increased Anglicization in the workplace and that companies tend to take for granted that their employees are proficient in both written and spoken English.”
She analyzed the answers of 89 participants, the conclusions of ten interviews and several types of documents written in English, from one small and ten large companies in western Sweden, where English was used in the workplace.
Apelman focused on written English and “wanted to find out what types of texts engineers write and then look at what strategies they use to develop a text and what level of proficiency they need.”
Because more and more people will use written and spoken English in their workplace in the future, understanding the necessary level could improve the way that English is taught to engineering students, Apelman added.
She noticed that over half the people interviewed and having participated at the study wrote in English every day, AlphaGalileo reports.
E-mails were the text type that needed the lowest level of English proficiency, while at the same time, a very high level was necessary for instructions and reports.
Gender had nothing to do with writing tasks, as they depended on the position within the organization.
Most of the interviewed people said that they would rather write a report in English than in Swedish, because of certain words and expressions that were apparently easier to identify in English.
This process of a language losing its usefulness in technical writing, is called a domain loss and it also has been observed in other areas.
The written documents seemed to transmit messages correctly, even if there were many grammatical errors, and, according to the authors, this is likely the result of the authors’ ability to apply discourse conventions such as expected thematic structures.
Apelmann concluded that “the great diversity observed in the writing tasks and documents suggests that authentic texts and writing tasks from selected workplaces should be used in teaching in order to prepare students for the diversity awaiting them in their future workplaces.”