Adult monolingual policy becomes children’s bilingual practice: code-alternation among children and staff in an English-medium preschool in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Parents, teachers and institutions often attempt to implement monolingual policies in bilingual settings, believing that they thereby facilitate children’s bilingual development. Children, however, often have their own communicative agendas. In this study, we investigate how the twofold language policy of an English-medium preschool in Sweden is put into practice in everyday interaction. The results show that children (aged 3–4) develop a broader range of code alternation practices than the staff uses in their interaction with the children. The paper analyses several examples of spontaneous interaction either between staff and children, or among children playing with each other in the preschool. We show how the preschool’s English language profile in practice becomes a bilingual policy, which encourages children not only to acquire English and Swedish in the preschool, but also to learn different ways to manage their bilingualism in the school context.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• code alternation
• monolingual policy
• bilingual interaction
• child bilingualism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the school, its children, staff and parents for their participation in the project, as well as a student, Juliana Zapata, who collected data and wrote her BA paper on some of the material presented in this paper. Thanks also to Julia Forsberg for improving our phonetic transcriptions. We are grateful for comments and suggestions from colleagues in data sessions in both Gothenburg and Linköping and at the Nordisco conference in Jyväskylä in November 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sally Boyd is Professor emerita of general linguistics at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her teaching and research have focused on bi- and multilingualism from a sociolinguistic perspective. In recent years, she has been particularly interested in language policy and children’s bilingual interaction in institutional settings.

Cajsa Ottesjö, Ph.D., is a researcher in general linguistics at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of interactional linguistics and talk-in-interaction, with a particular interest in children’s interaction and the grammar of conversation particularly that of discourse particles.

Notes

1. As early as the 1970s, however, Swedish municipalities were required to offer mother tongue instruction to children who use a language other than Swedish at home, under certain conditions. (Skollagen kap. 2010, 10 §7)

2. Information about language background or use in the home is considered sensitive information in Sweden (Azar et al. 2009), so although this information might be available for compulsory school pupils, in order to provide them with instruction in these languages, it was not available for the children studied here.

3. The methodology of the project as a whole was approved by the Regional Board of Research Ethics in Linköping.

4. The word is actually attested in Korp, a large corpus of written Swedish. We can’t know for sure if they created it here or not.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 721-2011-5842].