Christina Hedman

Struggles for legitimacy in mother tongue instruction in Sweden

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and the fact that the subject and its teachers are often contested in public debate. In this study, the teachers’ narratives center round issues of legitimacy, both for the subject per se and for the teachers’ right to be viewed as ‘real’ teachers. In this paper, we highlight how the teachers link mother tongue instruction to the notion of a ‘common heritage’ and how they see themselves as advocates and role models for the mother tongue. The teachers raise the status of mother tongue instruction in a transformational way, to a subject that is essential and can have a positive impact for a group of students who would otherwise be at a disadvantage in the school system. The undermining of mother tongue instruction was found to affect the pedagogical practices, as the teachers often took into consideration how their teaching would be viewed by parents and colleagues.

Profiling dyslexia in bilingual adolescents

Abstract This article addresses the issue of whether difficulties with reading and writing in a second language learner stem from developmental dyslexia or from issues associated with second language acquisition. In line with a phonological explanatory model of dyslexia, phonological processing and reading (decoding at both word and text levels) were tested, using data from 10 Spanish–Swedish speaking adolescents whose teachers had identified them as possibly having dyslectic difficulties, and a matched comparison group of 10 Spanish–Swedish speaking adolescents with no reading difficulties. Unlike previous studies, this analysis takes into account results from both languages and uses a matched bilingual comparison group as the norm. Based on these results, a bilingual dyslexia continuum is proposed as an analytical tool to be used for the assessment of developmental dyslexia from a bilingual perspective. The systematized continuum offers various degrees of difficulty —from high indications of dyslexia to no indications of dyslexia—and the positioning along this continuum by the target group participants of this study provides examples of both over- and under-identification of dyslexia. Overall, a greater number of participants in the target group were under-identified rather than over-identified by the schools. An important insight of this study is that the positioning of bilingual participants on the continuum would have been different if the analysis had taken only one of the two languages into account. Furthermore, possible effects from differences between Spanish and Swedish orthographies and syllable structure were observed, as, in general, the participants read more accurately in Spanish. The present data also suggest that decoding processing might vary more in second-language learners with dyslexia compared to monolingual individuals with dyslexia.

Language use and investment among children and adolescents of Somali heritage in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article explores language use and investment among Somali-speaking children and adolescents in Sweden, through group interviews and survey data. Our findings indicate that there are incentives to invest in Somali language learning considering the reported language use patterns and the expressed positive attitudes towards Somali mother tongue instruction. The Somali language was perceived to be ‘naturally’ linked to Somali identity and to being able to claim ‘Somaliness’, not only by the adolescents but also by the surroundings. Thus, advanced Somali language proficiency was perceived as necessary for being able to pass as ‘culturally authentic’ (Jaffe, A. [2012]. “Multilingual Citizenship and Minority Languages.” In The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, edited by M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge, and A. Creese, 83–99. London: Routledge). Furthermore, being perceived as unproficient in Somali or unable to transmit the language to future generations was experienced as guilt-provoking. Nevertheless, the adolescents articulated a compliance with the dominant linguistic order in Sweden, and their school’s assimilatory language rules (‘Swedish-only’). This compliance was associated with good manners and moral behaviour, thus reflecting the potentially harmful and pervasive nature of assimilatory language ideology and policy for individual students. The findings exemplify in many ways the struggles it entails to maintain and develop a minoritised language in a majority language context and the complex ‘ideological enterprise’ of language learning with its educational and ethical dilemmas.