The complexity of the learning and teaching of EFL among Swedish‐minority students in bilingual Finland

Abstract

In Finland, English is widely visible outside the school context, above all in the area of entertainment and mass media, and is no longer regarded as a foreign language in the old sense of the word. Among Swedish‐minority students in Finland, the dominant status of English in various mass media leads to positive attitudes towards English among students and provides strong motivation to acquire the language. This paper considers whether the incidental learning of English taking place outside the classroom results in the same kind of proficiency as that resulting from formal classroom learning.

Notes

Kaj Sjöholm is Professor of Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Department of Teacher Education at Åbo Akademi University, Strandgatan 2, PB 311, FIN‐65101 Vaasa, Finland; e‐mail: [email protected]. His research interests centre on second‐language classroom research, multilingual education, and the cultural dimension of foreign language learning/teaching in language minority settings.

It may be assumed that the acquisition of other foreign languages primarily takes place through formal learning and schooling. In short, it seems as if the out‐of‐school exposure to foreign languages other than English is relatively negligible, thus leaving the L2 student to resort to the drip‐feed instruction typical of ‘traditional’ language classrooms (Sjöholm 2001: 77–78).

These concepts were originally termed ‘basic interpersonal communicative skills’ (BICS) and ‘cognitive academic language proficiency’ (CALP) (Cummins 1979).

So far, there is not much evidence of the development of attitudes towards English or motivation to learn English at the primary level in Swedish‐speaking schools in Finland. However, Björklund (2000) found that most primary school pupils have, via mass media, acquired some receptive skills in English, but also productive ones, even before they receive formal instruction in that language. She also found that an overwhelming majority of her respondents (i.e. 80%) showed positive attitudes towards English. In another study at the primary level, Henriksén and Liljeberg (2000) found that the attitudes towards English were also very positive after the pupils had received formal instruction in English (in grade 5–6). Their study showed that the attitudes towards English were even more positive than towards Finnish (their second national language), but their study also indicated that the attitudes were more positive towards English as such than towards speakers of English or classroom English.

These differences by region were statistically significant, as were the differences between rural and urban areas.

Observations were made in eight lessons for each language group.

Teacher interviews revealed that Finnish EL teachers foregrounded the teaching of EL grammar because of the perceived differences between Finnish and English. The interviews with Swedish‐speaking teachers suggested that they devoted less time and resources to the grammatical system because of the relative structural similarities between Swedish and English.

Many researchers, in Finland and elsewhere, have pointed out that native speakers perceive advanced‐learner language as bookish, pedantic, and non‐idiomatic (see Ringbom 1993, Channell 1994, De Cock et al. 1998).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

KAJ SJÖHOLM

Kaj Sjöholm is Professor of Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Department of Teacher Education at Åbo Akademi University, Strandgatan 2, PB 311, FIN‐65101 Vaasa, Finland; e‐mail: [email protected]. His research interests centre on second‐language classroom research, multilingual education, and the cultural dimension of foreign language learning/teaching in language minority settings.