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Curriculum studies of mother-tongue in Sweden
papers in this thematic section cannot be said to represent them all, yet all four touch
upon different areas that are central to the field of study, and all four make important
contributions to the field.
One important topic that is not well represented in the previous conference proceedings
concern questions about mother-tongue education in preschool and in
the early years of schooling. It is also the case that mother-tongue education in the
early years has traditionally had a focus on early literacy – i.e. learning to read and
learning to write. The different traditions of the subject of Swedish are discussed in
this thematic section by Caroline Liberg, Jenny W Folkeryd and Åsa af Geijerstam in
their article “Swedish – an updated school subject?”. In their analysis of the current
and previous curriculum for Swedish and Swedish as a second language, they argue
that the old traditions still strongly influence even the latest the curriculum (from
2011). The traditions mentioned are: (1) a focus on the formal aspects of language,
especially in the early years; and (2) that the socio-political perspectives of literacy
learning and mother-tongue education are invisible in the early years of schooling.
The authors also emphasise the need for an extended view of what can be included
in mother-tongue education and – from a research perspective – that this extended
view may be captured with a more delicate meta-language that can be used when
discussing issues concerning mother-tongue education.
Another research topic of interest to develop is research on language issues in
subject areas other than mother-tongue education. Questions on reading, writing,
speaking and listening are traditionally associated with mother-tongue education in
school. However, during the past 20 years a growing number of studies have been
performed with the basic assumption that language is the key to understanding and
presenting content as well as managing activities in all subject areas. Students have to
be able to handle the specific wording and grammatical structure within each subject
area (e.g. Halliday & Martin, 1993; Schleppegrell 2004 and Jakobson & Axelsson, this
issue). In their article “‘Beating about the bush’ on the how and why in elementary
school science”, Britt Jakobson and Monica Axelsson address such research issues by
examining teacher instruction on scientific literacy and teacher expressions of ultimate
and subordinate purposes in a science unit in grade two. In their article, Jakobson
& Axelsson study 8-year-old pupils and thus also provide an important contribution
to knowledge on language development and written language development in the
early years of schooling, an area which has so far not been thoroughly investigated.
There is also a need for more comprehensive research on speaking and listening.
The majority of the research in the field concerns reading and writing. Further, there is
more research on reading than and on writing and, among the papers in the proceedings
that actually concern speaking and listening, listening is the least represented.
In light of this, the article in this issue “The art of listening in an educational perspective.
Listening reception in the mother tongue” by Kent Adelmann makes a relevant
contribution to the field of listening research. In this article, Adelmann discusses
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