Vierailijaluento ja tutkijatapaaminen: Ragni Vik Johnsen: Negotiating multilingual spaces and policies in an introductory class in Northern Norway

Negotiating multilingual spaces and policies in an introductory class in Northern Norway

Ragni Vik Johnsen

UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, ragni.v.johnsen@uit.no

The national curriculum in Norway states that all students shall experience that “knowing multiple languages is a resource” (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017). Despite this, studies indicate that many practitioners find it challenging to transform this into practice, especially in education for new migrant students (Burner & Carlsen, 2022), where the curriculum also encourages rapid progression in the majority language Norwegian. In this presentation I investigate the linguistic environments encountered by newly arrived immigrant students in a lower secondary school in Norway. The students are in an introductory class – a separate class within a mainstream school, where students who have recently arrived in Norway receive temporary, preparatory language and subject education before transitioning to mainstream classes. The data material is collected through a linguistic ethnography (Heller et al., 2017) and consists of classroom observations, photos of the linguistic landscape in school, interviews with students and their teachers and language policy documents. The data analysis draws on nexus analytical as a scalar ethnography, which allows to investigate both personal, discursive and interactional elements of social actions (Hult, 2016). The preliminary analysis sheds light on how language ideologies shape how students perceive school spaces and how they position themselves. Moreover, the analyses show examples of how contradictory language policies materialize in classroom practices (Jaspers, 2022) through impositions of monolingual policies on the one hand, and explicit orientations to a trope multilingualism as a resource on the other. I discuss possible implications of the findings for the students’ future educational trajectories, and how ambivalences and contradictions may serve as pedagogical possibilities.

References

Burner, T., & Carlsen, C. (2022). Teacher qualifications, perceptions and practices concerning multilingualism at a school for newly arrived students in Norway. International Journal of Multilingualism, 19(1), 35-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1631317 

Heller, M., Pietikäinen, S., & Pujolar, J. (2017). Critical sociolinguistic research methods : studying language issues that matter (First edition. ed.). Routledge, an imprint of Taylor and Francis. 

Hult, F. M. (2016). Nexus analysis as scalar ethnography for educational linguistics. In Researching Multilingualism (pp. 103-118). Routledge. 

Jaspers, J. (2022). Linguistic dilemmas and chronic ambivalence in the classroom. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 43(4), 281-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2020.1733586 

Kunnskapsdepartementet. (2017). Overordnet del – verdier og prinsipper for grunnopplæringen. Fastsatt som forskrift ved kongelig resolusjon. Læreplanverket for Kunnskapsløftet 2020.  Retrieved from https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/verdier-og-prinsipper-for-grunnopplaringen/id2570003/

Ragni Vik Johnsen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education and Pedagogy. She teaches different Norwegian courses at the teacher education program at the UiT – The Arctic University of Norway and supervises master students on topics related to inter alia multilingualism and Norwegian as a second language. Her research focuses on sociolinguistic approaches to multilingualism among young people and in school contexts. She completed her PhD on multilingual adolescents and their families in 2021. In her latest projects she investigates multilingualism in educational transitions (as part of the MultiTrans – Multilingualism in Transitions project) and the linguistic landscapes in Tromsø’s urban spaces.