The aim of this study is to find out the pupils’ thoughts and experiences about speaking English for second language acquisition in upper secondary school. We want to establish that oral communication is an important factor towards fulfilling the criteria to strive for in developing the pupils’ knowledge and skills in language learning according to the Curriculum for Compulsory School System (Skolverket, 2006) and the Syllabus for the English Subject (Skolverket, 2001). The background presents theoretical approaches in second language acquisition, such as Vygostskij’s, Piaget’s and Krashen’s theories of language acquisition. Communicative competence, affective factors, strategies and speech-codes used in the learning process have also been briefly described in this study. The methods used for collecting data were observations and interviews, with a qualitative survey and hermeneutic approach in focus. The research took place in three different schools in a municipality in southwest of Sweden. For the observations, there were 71 pupils participating in this study and 37 pupils wanted to collaborate for the interviews. No teacher or school workers were involved or participated in the observations or interviews. We wanted to keep the pupils’ point of view about how they use verbal language skills in English to gain knowledge about the target language.