Untitled

saxelmwifo enis swavlebis sakiTxebi:
problemebi da gamowvevebi
Issues of State Language Teaching;
Problems and Challenges
to integrate into the Finnish education system and society, to maintain their cultural identity their own native
language (ECRE; cf. Niessen, Schibel 2007).
Under the conception of immigrants may be refugees, migrants, remigrants, spouses from abroad, asylum
seekers and other foreigners. If the immigrant arrives at a compulsory school age (7–17), he or she has the
right to the same basic education as Finns. There is an elaborated system how to ensure that adult immigrants
learn language and working skills needed for earning their life and how their former qualifications could be
taken into account and profited of.
Some children learn state languages already in the day care centre (Mouna 2009). The pre-primary education
(for the 6 years old) may be organised in the form of preparatory instruction, in the kindergarten or combining
both variants, letting children grow into two cultures and two languages. It follows the general Core
Curriculum for Pre-school Education 2000 and takes into account immigrant children’s backgrounds. Legislation
allows for the creation of full-time education in the minority language, but this right is usually not exercised.
Instruction for immigrant children who have recently arrived in Finland may be arranged in preparatory
teaching groups or integrated into mainstream education, with support provided according to the children’s
needs including special arrangements for pupil’s assessment. Pupils are entitled to instruction in their own
religion if their parents or caretakers allow. Special preparatory classes exist for immigrant children and are
aimed at the intensive teaching of Finnish or Swedish as a second language and the propaedeutics of other
basic school disciplines. During this time the mother tongue is used as a tool of explanation and is also taught
as a subject itself. Usually a child has the opportunity to study in such state-financed classes for one year, with
a maximum of 10 to 12 pupils per group. Children then join the mainstream at a minimum of 450 hours of
instruction for six-to-ten year olds and 500 hours for older children. In appropriate subjects, e.g. sports, music
or the arts, children can be mainstreamed earlier. Morning and afternoon activities are supplied to eliminate
risk factors caused by the lack of adult control and too much time spent unaccompanied. The study of Finnish
or Swedish continues both in regular classes and in separate groups, with the goal of fully integrating foreign
children into Finland's pedagogical culture. All schoolchildren in Finland whose mother tongue is not Finnish
or Swedish, are entitled to lessons in their native language two hours per week, as long as a group of four pupils
close in age can be formed at the beginning of the school year (even if they are drawn from adjacent
school districts or municipalities). Native language instruction for immigrants is provided in 50 different languages
to 11,000 pupils in 80 municipalities. A national core curriculum for basic education establishes standards
for the teaching of immigrant pupils in the form of study plans and targeted achievement levels of eight
on a ten-point scale. Working groups of home language teachers have developed teaching models for respective
languages. Schools and other educational institutions offer many opportunities for heritage language instruction,
although it is not available everywhere, and not all parents are aware of their rights. Training for
teachers of immigrant languages and cultures is subsidized by the government and can be conducted in the
respective languages (IEF; Latomaa 2007). Sometimes, new forms of the Finnish language emerge as a result
of code-mixing, code-switching and linguistic hybridization with special goals or spontaneously (Lehtonen
2008). The long-term goal of immigrants is to join the mainstream, avoiding the risk to be neither here nor
there (Saukkonen 2010).
The case of Russian
There is a whole assortment of Russian speakers living now in Finland: the New Russians, including ethnic
Russians, Ingermanland Finns and Russia-Finns, former citizens of the Soviet Union and nowadays citizens
of the CIS or EU countries, of different ages, born in Finland or in Russia; the Old Russians, it means the
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