The complexity of the learning and teaching of EFL among Swedish-minority students in bilingual Finland

In Finland, English is widely visible outside the school context, above all in the area of entertainment and mass media, and is no longer regarded as a foreign language in the old sense of the word. Among Swedish-minority students in Finland, the dominant status of English in various mass media leads to positive attitudes towards English among students and provides strong motivation to acquire the language. This paper considers whether the incidental learning of English taking place outside the classroom results in the same kind of proficiency as that resulting from formal classroom learning.