In recent years, universities across Europe have increasingly adopted the use of English as an academic lingua franca. Our article discusses current trends in Swedish higher education by presenting the results of a large-scale survey on the use of English conducted at Stockholm University. The survey involved 668 staff and 4524 students and focused on the use of English for academic purposes and students' and teachers' attitudes to English as a medium of instruction. The results indicate that complex patterns of academic English use emerge, which are related to the specific discipline studied, the level of instruction (undergraduate versus Master's) and the receptive versus productive use of English. They also indicate that in the sciences the use of English is a pragmatic reality for both teachers and students, whereas in the humanities and social sciences, English is typically used as an additional or auxiliary language in parallel with Swedish.

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Although the concept of metacognition has received considerable attention for its impact on learning across disciplinary areas, it has not been sufficiently discussed in the context of L2 academic reading and writing. In this paper, we bring together two theoretical frameworks, genre analysis and metacognition theory, and discuss the concept of metacognitive genre awareness. Drawing on the analysis of the data collected from a group of pre-service English teachers at a major Swedish university, we examine the process of building this awareness within ESP genre-based academic reading and writing instruction and show how it influences L2 students' ability to interpret and compose academic texts. All study participants have developed declarative (what) and procedural (how) metacognitive knowledge of genre-relevant aspects of academic texts, but only a few have demonstrated conditional (when and why) knowledge of the genre in their reading analyses and writing assignments. Thus, using a metacognition framework to study L2 academic writing provides us with new theoretical insights and practical applications for L2 instruction.