Definithet, bestämdhet och artikelbruk – en missad svårighet i L2-svenska?

A well-known difficulty for learners of L2 Swedish is the complexity of definiteness in form and meaning, together with article use. Several studies have indicated that learners lacking morphological definiteness in their L1 struggle more with structures within this area although learners with corresponding structures in their L1 also have issues. This article describes how this area’s complexity is presented in Swedish teaching materials for learners with varying L1 (in total seven book series) and Finnish teaching materials intended for Finnish-speaking teenagers learning Swedish (in total six book series). The CEFR levels of the teaching materials vary between A1 and B1. The results show that the complexity of definiteness and article use is unaddressed in their entirety in all of the teaching materials. The Finnish teaching materials deal with this problem in more detail than the Swedish ones – for instance the form of a noun preceded by an adjectival pronoun – probably because definiteness is a notorious source of difficulty for Finnish-speaking Swedish learners. In addition, the fact that Swedish grammar is contrasted with Finnish in the Finnish teaching materials supports this assumption. What the teaching materials have in common is that direct anaphor is given more weight than the different types of definite meaning, which does not align with definite meaning in the real language use, and that the relationship between form and meaning is unaddressed. A consequence of this simplification of the definiteness problem is that it can make learning harder, regardless of whether the learners have equivalents in their L1 or not.