This paper compares teaching practices of English as a foreign language in Sweden and Germany based on a questionnaire targeted at investigating teachers’ experiences and views on language use, giving a snapshot of teaching practices in classrooms in the two countries. In this regard, the focus is on the following questions: Which target varieties are used in TEFL, and to what extent? What is the status of different target varieties among teachers of English in the two countries? The results show that the use of target varieties is still in play in the TEFL classroom, despite the recent move towards communicative competence as the goal. The main target varieties used are AmE, BrE, a mixture of the two, and some neutral variety; with a slight preference among German teachers for BrE and among Swedish for the neutral variety alongside AmE or BrE. Further, teachers are in conflict between two ideals: learned (where they teach an English belonging to the native speakers) and didactic (where the goal is communicative fluency). In application, this conflict should be addressed by teacher training programmes in order to make (future) teachers aware of it and provide possible ways to cope with it.

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) can be used to break down sludge structure and generate carbonaceous hydrochar suitable for solid fuel or value-added material applications. The separation of char and the reaction medium however generates a filtrate, which needs to treated before potential discharge. Thus, this work determined filtrate properties based on HTC temperature and sludge moisture content and estimated the discharge emissions and the potential increase in analyte loads to an industrial wastewater treatment plant based on derived regression models. Direct discharge of HTC filtrate would significantly increase effluent emissions at the mill, indicating the filtrate treatment is crucial for the future implementation of HTC at pulp and paper mills. Recycling the HTC filtrate to the wastewater plant would lead to only a nominal increase in effluent flow, but would increase the suspended solids, BOD, COD and total nitrogen loads by 0.1-0.8%, 3.8-5.3%, 2.7-3.1% and 42-67%, respectively, depending on HTC temperature.

The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.

Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and selfassess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews where 111 participants self-assess their Swedish, English and additional home languages. During the self-assessment, participants use different points of reference when reflecting on the different languages in their repertoires. Four main categories of answers are found, all relating to an absent referee in some manner: the participants' evaluations of other people's language proficiency compared to their own; their proficiency in other languages; their evaluation of their proficiency in relation to formal grading and feedback given in school; and their own experiences of their limitations and abilities in different situations. When assessing Swedish, participants display attitudes towards 'good' and 'bad' language and contextualise their proficiency in a way that focuses on standard language ideologies and their speech community. The same pattern does not occur when participants reflect on their other languages, indicating the important role that the peer group and speech community have in creating and facilitating these ideologies. ARTICLE HISTORY