Constructing the multilingual child: the case of language education policy in Norway

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to trace how the multilingual child has been variably constructed in Norway’s language education policy discourse over time. This will be explored through an in-depth critical discourse analytical (CDA) reading of two official policy reports targeting specifically the situation of children of non-Norwegian ethnolinguistic heritage in Norway’s educational system. The key analytical concept is intertextuality, connecting the various discursive layers of Norway’s language education policy processes, each replete with a multitude of voices with a stake in shaping the language educational reality of Norway’s young multilinguals. The paper demonstrates that there is a substantial intertextual differential in how the two reports draw on these voices to either challenge or endorse the structural forces of powerful institutions, such as the state, reflecting also the wider social and discursive current of change sweeping through the traditionally egalitarian welfare states of Northern Europe, such as Norway.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual child
• language education policy
• critical discourse analysis
• intertextuality
• interdiscursivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jarmila Bubikova-Moan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway. In her doctoral dissertation, she explores how multilingualism and literacy in multiple languages are constructed in the various discourses on the multilingual child in the Norwegian educational system.

Notes

1. In this paper, all translations from Norwegian are my own.

2. All statistics in this section are drawn from Statistics Norway (2014, 2015) and Oslo Municipality (2015).

3. The corpus comprised nearly 350,000 words in total, with R2010 being more than thrice the size of R1995. The analysis has been performed by use of NVivo 10.

4. Although English may more commonly use constructions such as ‘language minority / minority language (child)’ rather than ‘minority-language-speaking (child)’, the provided translations are as literal as possible, so that the original semantic nuancing in Norwegian, essential for subsequent analysis, is preserved.

5. Throughout the paper, all underlining within citations from the analyzed texts is mine.