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This article is based on an ethnographic study of the transport program, a vocational education with strong masculine tradition, in a Swedish upper secondary school. It looks at the ways that notions of intelligence and smartness are culturally produced and used in the daily practises of students and teachers. In the article, I discuss how such notions inform, but also limit, students’ learning and their constructions of identity in school, with possible consequences for their futures, and for the reproduction of social and gender-based inequalities in the wider society. My aim is to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about cognitive ability and school results, and to point to the capacity of the concept of smartness as such to contribute to producing unequal outcomes in a school system, which allegedly offers all students, regardless of social background and gender, equal chances to succeed.

Motivational strategies are underresearched, and studies so far conducted have been in sociolinguistic contexts where English is not extensively encountered outside the classroom. Given also that little is known about strategies relating to the design and content of classroom activities, the purpose of this study is to identify and critically evaluate strategies focusing on activity design and content in classroom activities that, in a setting where students have extensive extramural English encounters, teachers have found to be effective in generating motivation. Using Dörnyei's () taxonomy of motivational strategies as an analytical tool, 112 descriptions of motivational activities provided by a randomly drawn sample of secondary EFL teachers in Sweden (N = 252) were content‐analyzed with a focus on design and content. Providing support for Dörnyei's proposals, the results reveal the prominence of activities that enable students to work with authentic materials (cultural artefacts produced for a purpose other than teaching) and in ways that can be experienced as authentic. Activities involving digital technologies which provide opportunities for creativity are also prominent. Use of authentic materials places high demands on teachers’ pedagogical and linguistic skills. In contexts where students respond positively to such activities, teachers’ language awareness skills become of significant importance.

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