cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

the terms multilingual and multicultural are used. This shift in emphasis is a
consequence of the regulation that children can receive mother tongue education in one
language only. Sweden wants pupils also to acquire a theoretical knowledge about
language and thus make comparisons with Swedish.
The study
My study was conducted in the spring of 2007. I interviewed seven children between
the age of 10 and 14 years who were attending mother tongue education. I developed
an oral questionnaire because I knew that narrative interviews would be difficult to
conduct with the children. The children had a mother tongue that is a European
language and which is also taught as second foreign language in Swedish schools
(French, German, Spanish). All children had parents from Western Europe. After
conducting my oral questionnaires I examined the pupils’ responses and grouped them
according to developing themes. These themes developed as I worked through the
responses; some of the initial themes merged into larger themes and other themes
developed into more detailed ones. In this way I did not impose my own views on the
children’s responses, but rather allowed them to find their own voice in my analysis.
Findings of the study
“The monolingual habitus of the multilingual school”
The title of Ingrid Gogolin’s dissertation is fitting for these children. Even though they
speak an accepted and appreciated European language, their language knowledge is not
used in the schools. An exception was a boy who was helping the teacher with his
language because the whole class was going to visit his parents’ home country.
Because the teacher does not speak the language very well, the boy was preparing
words that the other children should learn as homework. But it was only because of the
class excursion that his knowledge played a role in school.
On the other hand another pupil was asked in school: “How do you celebrate Easter in
your country?” This well-meant question did not have the effect of bringing new
customs into the classroom the teacher expected because this pupil had never
celebrated Easter in “her” country. She came from a mixed marriage where the father
spoke a different language from Swedish, but did not speak it with his children 4 . All
her life was “Swedish” – the way her mother lived!
4 Skutnabb-Kangas (1981) spoke of elite-bilinguals who come from a higher socio-economic status and
support their children in all ways with their mother tongue. This example contradicts my own views: I
do not think that socio-economic status predicts the support children get in their mother tongue.
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