Over the last decades, the changing patterns in migration, technologies and communication have brought about shifts in interaction and communication, as well as a newness in the way that we perform identities. These shifts involve challenges and change for L1 school subjects, since the subjects have strong ties to cultural heritage and national languages. Also, these changes may imply that we need new tools to develop an understanding of L1 subjects in this new context.

In L1 research, the concept of paradigm is often used to explore change. Sawyer & van de Ven define it as the manner ‘in which topics, activities and legitimacy are connected to different conceptions of language and literature’ (2006, p. 10). Also, they characterize L1 subjects as poly-paradigmatic, that is that different subject paradigms compete and exist simultaneously. However, the concept also raises criticism (Green & Erixon 2020). Therefore, in this talk, we aim to explore and discuss the paradigm concept in relation to teachers’ constructions of L1 Swedish. We ask the following questions:

• How do teachers and the teaching construct the what, how and why of L1 Swedish?• What concepts, other than paradigm, can be developed to serve as conceptual tools for L1 research as well as L1 teachers?

Our study is a pilot conducted within a larger project with the goal to develop analytical tools. It consists of interviews with secondary school L1 teachers and classroom observations of L1 teaching in secondary schools. Not surprisingly, we found that the informants’ view on L1 Swedish show traces from all of Sawyer and van de Ven’s (2006) paradigms: academic, developmental, communicative, and utilitarian. Furthermore, we found the same pattern in the classroom observations. In our talk, we discuss the problems of a paradigm analysis and discuss alternative ways of analyzing the data.