Abstract Summary
Study guidance in the mother tongue (SGMT) should according to the Swedish Education Ordinance be provided for students who needs support in their mother tongue or previous school language in order to reach the goals of the different school subjects. The objective of the study presented here is to investigate how policy is locally constructed to support pupils with subject content in their strongest language through SGMT. Taking the point of departure in ethnography of language policy and language policy as practice we are interested in the construction, negotiation and appropriation of language policy as well as the intertextuality between the different actors.
Abstract :
The number of individuals that migrate across national borders are increasing and for children such migration often means that they are faced with a new school system with instruction in a language which they are just beginning to learn. Study guidance in the mother tongue (SGMT) should according to the Swedish Education Ordinance be provided for students who needs support in their mother tongue or previous school language in order to reach the goals of the different school subjects. The objective of the study presented here is to investigate how policy is locally constructed to support pupils with subject content in their strongest language through SGMT. Taking the point of departure in ethnography of language policy and language policy as practice we are interested in the construction, negotiation and appropriation of language policy as well as the intertextuality between the different actors. The empirical material was produced in the project Mother Tongue and Study Guidance in Compulsory School and consists of semi-structured interviews with 16 SGMT assistants and five school leaders in two municipalities in Sweden. During the time of the study a municipal policy for SGMT was being produced and thus the local policy document as well as a semi-structured interview with the central actor in the policy making process has been analyzed in the study. The results show how many SGMT assistants were struggling to find ways of supporting the students despite constrains in regard to time and lack of cooperation with subject teachers. The development of a municipal policy illustrates on the one hand the need to control the work of SGMT assistants and on the other hand to hand to build an organization that supports SGMT.
