The aim of this paper is to examine how Finnish learners of Swedish use connectors in their written narratives at CEFR-levels A1, A2 and B1. It has been investigated what the typical use of connectors is at each CEFR-level and in which functions different connectors have been used. The theoretical framework of the study is systemic-functional linguistics. The material consists of 303 narratives written by Finnish pupils in comprehensive school and upper-secondary school. The material which is used in this study is a part of the corpus of learners’ Swedish which has been gathered during the project Topling – Paths in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. The results show that more connectors have been used at higher CEFR-levels and especially the number of när (when), eftersom (because) and att (that) rises when a learner shifts to a higher CEFR-level. In addition, the systemic-functional analysis shows that most of the connectors are used in a same way at all levels and mostly in their prototypic functions with a few exceptions such as the comparative connector som (as) which has been used either as a temporal or a causal connector. In future, learners’ connector-usage in Swedish should be studied in different text types and it should be compared with a native speaker’s connector-usage. Also the systemic-functional perspective should be emphasized more in future studies.

Nyckelord: Konnektorer, Systemisk-funktionell lingvistik, Svenska som andraspråk, CEFR