Roles and positioning in a meeting between Finland‐Swedish bilingual pupils and their teacher*

Abstract

This paper explores some aspects of the dialogue between bilingual pupils and their teacher in a Swedish‐speaking school in Finland, in a strongly Finnish‐dominated environment. Using a socio‐cultural perspective I look behind the immediate interaction in the classroom to show how pupils express and position themselves through the classroom dialogue. Thus the dialogue extends beyond the specific situational context. For the bilingual pupils, part of their school life involves finding and understanding the systems and the open and hidden codes that exist and affect communication in the school. The changed face of the linguistic situation in the Swedish‐speaking schools in Finland requires changed practices of teaching.

Notes

Anna Slotte‐Lüttge is a graduate student in the Department of Teacher Education, Åbo Akademi University, PB 311, FIN‐65101 Vasa, Finland; e‐mail: anna.slotte‐[email protected]. She is studying the interaction between bilingual pupils and their teachers with a focus on strategies, identity, and power, with language and dialogue as the main threads.

In order to form a complex picture of what takes place in the interactive situation—and to give a sense of the significance of the context—I combine a narrative method of analysis with positioning analysis. I apply positioning analysis in the sense that, starting from the conversations I have had with the teacher and the pupils, I look at the dialogue from different positions. In order to understand the school from the inside it is necessary to ‘engage oneself into how activities are perceived and to try to understand how phenomena are attributed meaning by individual pupils from the positions they take up’ (Bergqvist 2001: 38–39). With the help of positioning analysis, I can examine ‘how one communicatively relates to someone else in consideration to something’ (Ongstad 1999: 148).

Hundeide (2001: 158–163) talks about an ‘intersubjective room’ that determines what is natural and reasonable to express, both from the position of the teacher and the student. This intersubjective room feeds off everything—from the curriculum and the school's informal school culture on a more comprehensive level to factors on the classroom level, e.g. the physical organization of the classroom and the communicative code. The ‘game’ that the intersubjective room constitutes comprises both the formulated rules and the hidden codes of the communication model. Fuglestad (1999: 14) uses the terms ‘individual competence’ and ‘relational competence’. Relational competence requires that the pupils and the teacher conjointly create a communicative space with its own specific attitudes, patterns, and systems.

Instruction in Finnish is introduced in grade 3, at the age of 9, when the pupils are divided into two groups on the basis of a test with an oral and a written component. During Finnish lessons the pupils speak Finnish with each other and the teacher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

ANNA SLOTTE‐LÜTTGE (translated by Annika Lund)

Anna Slotte‐Lüttge is a graduate student in the Department of Teacher Education, Åbo Akademi University, PB 311, FIN‐65101 Vasa, Finland; e‐mail: anna.slotte‐[email protected]. She is studying the interaction between bilingual pupils and their teachers with a focus on strategies, identity, and power, with language and dialogue as the main threads.