Decoding the rules of schooling – instruction of recently immigrated adolescents with emergent literacy in a language introductory school in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the rules of schooling which might be new to recently immigrated adolescents with few prior experiences of school-based learning. The purpose was to study how the ‘external grammar’ (Gee 2005)—i.e. the thoughts, beliefs, values, actions and social interactions—associated with a classroom was negotiated in a language introductory school in Sweden. The ethnographic data were collected during one school year spent among ten students and their teachers. The analysis considers examples from the data that are ordered into three broad categories: chrono-spatial discipline, the use of literacy tools and practices, and being a student in relation to others. Some of these rules seemed to promote learning in this specific context, but also prepared the students for future studies, while other rules seemed adapted to these particular students’ prerequisites for learning. Examples of some students challenging these rules are also analysed as a demonstration of students’ agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Formal schooling
• recently immigrated adolescents
• emergent literacy
• semiotic social spaces

Introduction

When children go to school for the first time in their lives, they are taught to follow certain rules and practices that are specific to that particular space. For example, they learn how to follow timetables, how to use school materials and how to relate to their teachers, other staff, and to their peers. These rules are reproduced through educational institutions and may have a great impact on the content and methods of instruction (Bernstein 2000). Many teenagers are aware of these rules and do not need explicit instruction in them, since they have already spent several years in different classrooms, learning how to conform to practices that are expected in school. However, adolescents with emergent literacy, who make their debut in the formal school system need to decode these rules. They might also face other, tremendous challenges related to formal education, not least if they have moved to a foreign country whose local language they do not understand.¹ In the present ethnographic study, attention was paid to the instruction of behaviours and relations that are part of schooling for this specific demographic, to investigate the relationship between rule instruction and academic development.

In recent decades, Sweden has experienced a large increase in numbers of migrant adolescents,² many of whom arrive with little prior experience of school-based learning (Skolverket 2016, 189). Even though these students are no longer children and have adhered to many complex social practices in their lives, they need to learn to follow new rules in this new setting, while simultaneously developing a new language and literacy. Thus, adolescent entrants in school constitute a particular group in education that falls in between children, whose schooling practices are well studied (Lawn and Grosvenor 2005), and adults, whose participation in higher education has also been subject to increasing interest (Tight 2012).

The purpose of this paper was to contribute to this knowledge by investigating how the rules of schooling were negotiated and established in one specific classroom, with one group of students and their teacher, in a language introductory school in Sweden. Using Gee’s (2005) terminology, this context can be considered a semiotic social space, which is defined as a space in which people get and give meaning to signs (Gee 2005, 216). This space has its own internal grammar, a set of signs within this space, and an external grammar, the way in which people behave or interact in relation to these signs. Gee’s framework is useful for analysing school contexts, since it may clarify how the rules and practices of the classroom are connected to the learning content, and how different actors, like the teacher and the students, might interact with regard to this learning content. The study was guided by the following research questions: 1) What values, actions, social interactions and interpersonal relations are made explicit as desirable in this context? 2) How is the external grammar related to the internal grammar in this semiotic social space? 3) How is students’ agency manifested in relation to the external grammar?

It was important to study this specific context to better understand the students’ learning conditions. Furthermore, since the rules of schooling were here made explicit, they can be used for comparison to other school settings to highlight the prerequisites for schooling in Sweden and similar societies.

Research on migrant students in formal school systems

A number of studies have examined recently immigrated students’ inclusion in (or exclusion from) the formal school system (Bartlett 2007; Warriner 2007; Bouakaz and Bunar 2015). Lund (2016) investigated adolescent students who had not achieved sufficient grades in a Swedish compulsory school to be able to continue to upper secondary school. These students were not necessarily recently immigrated but often had an immigrant background. The staff in this school appeared to be friendly and close to their students and also encouraged them to do schoolwork. According to Lund (2016), humour and physical contact, particularly through hugs³, seemed to connect the students’ everyday lives and interests to the dimensions of schooling. The teachers would also sometimes transgress their professional roles in order to make the students come to school.

Other studies focus on the schooling of immigrant adolescents with emergent literacy and little prior experience of formal school-based learning (Bigelow and Schwarz 2010; Young-Scholten 2015). Brännström, Reimers and Asp-Onsjö (2019) analyse how students with limited educational backgrounds in Sweden were made intelligible within the framework of a compulsory school. The staff did not seem familiar with this category of students and found them enigmatic, using medical or racialized discourses to explain the students’ challenges, instead of recognising that they were not used to school practices. For example, a student who struggled to read was considered in need of too many medical or psychological assessment, even though she had emergent literacy. One teacher suggested that some of these students might be intellectually disabled, or belong to cultural groups that do not value education. Similarly, Roy and Roxas (2011) describe how a group of students struggled and failed in the American school system. The educators seemed to blame the students, using a deficit discourse, instead of teaching them the practices of schooling or reaching out to their families, who were concerned about their children’s progress. Brown, Miller and Mitchell’s interview study (2006) in an Australian context showed how their participants, who were recently immigrated Sudanese students with interrupted schooling, were motivated to engage with the academic and social practices within schools. However, the students also recognised challenges related to their schooling, such as academic language and literacy, cultural knowledge and pedagogical practices that were foreign to them. Among these challenges was the way that norms or values might vary between different cultural contexts. Winlund (2019) investigates how such differences were discussed among a group of immigrant adolescents, who were new to school, and their teacher. In this case the topic concerned family relations and heteronormativity. In another article, Winlund (2020) uses the Continua of Biliteracy (Hornberger 2003) to investigate the complexity of multiliteracies among recently immigrated adolescents with emergent literacy. This model served to avoid a deficit perspective on this category of students and to demystify the instruction of emergent literacy among teenagers. In addition, the study shows how the interpersonal relations between the teacher and the students played an important role in the instruction and learning.

Thus, educational institutions need to be aware of the social and pedagogical practices that are used in specific contexts and the challenges they entail for newly arrived students with little prior experience of formal education. The present article focuses on practices which are made explicit in a language introductory classroom in a large city in Sweden.

The language introductory classroom as a semiotic social space

Participating in formal education for the first time in your life as a teenager means entering a new space characterised by particular practices, discourses and symbol systems. Gee would call this a semiotic social space (Gee 2005, 216). Semiotic social spaces (henceforth SSS) are not necessarily physical, but also virtual spaces which bring together a group sharing a sign system of meaning, such as in the computer games that are of particular interest to Gee (cf. Gee 2003; Gee and Hayes 2012). According to Gee (2005), an SSS is defined by certain characteristics. First, it must have content, ‘something for the space to be “about”’ (Gee 2005, 218). The source of the content – or the sign system­ – that the class is interacting with is called a generator for the SSS. In a classroom, the generator might for example be the textbook, the teacher or a field trip. The generated sign systems consist of both internal signs or grammar, designating the learning content of the SSS, and external signs or grammar, representing people’s thoughts, beliefs, values, actions and social interactions in relation to the internal signs (Gee 2005, 218). There are ‘one or more portals with which to enter the SSS […]. A portal is anything that gives access to the signs of the SSS and to ways of interacting with those signs, by oneself or with other people’ (Gee 2005, 220). In a traditional classroom, this portal might often be represented by the teacher, but also by the textbook, the computer, group discussions or other activities that give students access to meaning making.

The SSS of the classroom can be considered a subspace of the larger school space (Gee 2005, 220). It does not have to be restricted to the actual classroom, but can be extended beyond its walls, via e-mails to scientists or field trips to scientific sites, which might serve as portals (and/or generators). However, Gee (2005) argues that the instruction in traditional school settings typically does not reach out in a substantive way to other spaces that might be interesting and meaningful to students, albeit this would enhance learning. At the same time, Baynham (2006) suggests that educators should allow students (in his example, adult learners of English) to bring the outside world into the classroom to create an open atmosphere and a dynamic interaction that make room for students’ opportunities and agency (Baynham 2006, 37f.).

In Sweden, pupils between 16 and 19 years of age with little prior experience of formal school-based learning, and with emergent levels of literacy, can attend language introductory classes within a regular upper secondary school for two years or more if necessary (Skolinspektionen 2017). Here, the focus is on the development of Swedish and the content of elementary school. Thus, within this organisation, the students can develop alphabetic print literacy and prepare for further education. However, schooling does not only concern learning literacy, language and school subjects (Wallace 1988; Janks 2010; Schleppegrell 2012), but also adapting to social behaviours and relations (Heath 1983; Gee 2015). Such social elements are expected in school and are intended to promote learning. An internal view of SSS in the present context would include considering the signs that instruction makes available for meaning making. For example: How do the students learn to read and write? What content and what sort of language and discourses are presented in the textbooks or by the teachers? An external view of SSS would instead concern the ways in which the students and the teachers behave and interact in relation to the signs made available (Gee 2005, 219).

Context of the study

The present article is part of a larger ethnographic study with a selective intermittent time mode (Jeffrey and Troman 2004). This means that the fieldwork took place over a long period of time, between September 2017 and June 2018, and that a focus on a particular aspect of the social space was selected as the research developed. I observed one student group at a Swedish inner-city school which exclusively offers language introductory classes to newly arrived immigrant adolescents. In order to organise appropriate groups, the school interviews the students and assesses their literacy, numeracy and language skills. The students that I observed were placed in level one, which is the lowest of three levels, since they had little prior experience of formal school-based learning and emergent levels of literacy. The ten students, who are presented in Table 1, came from Somalia, Afghanistan and the Gambia and had been in Sweden for between 6 months to 1.5 years after migrating to Sweden on their own or with their families.

Table 1. Presentation of the participants in the study.

Pseudonyms	Reported year of birth	Male (M) or Female (F)	Country of origin	Reported years of formal schooling	Reported arrival in Sweden	Ethnographic interviews
Adam	1998	M	Gambia	0	2016, joining his family here	22/11/17. Alone in English (30 min)
Amina	2000	F	Somalia	0	2016, alone	18/04/18. With Balquis, in Somali (40 min)
Balqis	2000	F	Somalia	?	2017, with her family	18/04/18. With Amina, in Somali (40 min)
Fuad	2000	M	Somalia	0	2017, alone	12/03/18. With Zubeyr, in Somali (50 min)
Hamid	1999	M	Afghanistan		2015, alone	01/06/18. Alone in Swedish (20 min)
Hawa	1998	F	Somalia	?	2016, with her family	-
Maram	2000	F	Somalia	0	2016, with her family	28/03/18. With Sumaya, in Somali (45 min)
Samia	2000	F	Somalia	2	2016, alone	20/04/18. Alone in Somali (30 min)
Sumaya	1999	F	Somalia	3	2016, with her family	28/03/18. With Maram, in Somali (45 min)
Zubeyr	2000	M	Somalia	0	2016, alone	12/03/18. With Fuad, in Somali (50 min)

The students’ teacher, whom I call Elisabeth,⁴ is in her sixties and has extended experience teaching adolescent pupils with emergent literacy. She appeared to be highly appreciated by present and former students, who often returned to visit her at school; this raised my interest in observing her student group. Permission was granted by the school management. I observed the group for a whole school day (often 8:30-14:00), two or three days a week, throughout the school year, concentrating on their instruction and development of literacy and school subjects during their lessons in Swedish and social sciences. For a few hours each week, Somali and Farsi language tutors assisted the group.

Although it must be emphasised that immigrant adolescents represent a highly heterogenous group of students, Solberg et al. (2020) show that four out of ten adolescents who immigrated to Sweden between 2014 and 2018 suffered from posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD). Many of them fled from war zones in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. In the present study, several of the students had experienced traumatic events before, during or after their relocation. Some of them frequently showed signs of sleep deprivation or longing for their families and others complained about recurrent headaches and nausea. Severe trauma might have an impact on students’ memory and ability to learn new things (Moradi et al.1999; Yasik et al. 2007) and sleeping impairment or anxiety may affect students’ abilities to concentrate and participate in school (Ascher 2014). Still, like many other L2 adolescents who are new to school, these students also seemed motivated to learn (cf. Brown, Miller, and Mitchell 2006; Roy and Roxas 2011) and, on several occasions, expressed their appreciation of finally getting access to formal education. Unlike the students in Lund’s study (2016), who attended an introductory school because they did not get sufficient grades in compulsory school, these students had never had the opportunity to try until now. According to the school’s documentation and to the stories that the students shared with me, they had attended school for 0–3 years before arriving in Sweden. Some of the students from Somalia had attended qur’anic schools to learn to read and write the Qur’an in Arabic, and some of them had also learnt to read and write in Somali at home or in private schools (which are not run by the Somali state but are often organised in people’s homes: (cf. Bigelow and King 2014)). The boys from Afghanistan and the Gambia had attended qur’anic schools sporadically as children.

There is no set curriculum for the teachers to use in language introductory programmes, since the education here should be adapted to the individual students’ needs (Skolverket 2020). The instructional focus in this group was on the development of basic Swedish, reading and writing the Latin alphabet and learning basic facts such as geography, world knowledge and the body’s anatomy—corresponding to the content of Grades 1–3 in compulsory school (Winlund 2020). Unlike children in elementary school, however, these teenagers were also taught about more mature subjects such as working life, personal relations and sexuality (cf. Winlund 2019).

Collection and analysis of data

The empirical data consisted of field notes from 165 h of participant observation (Walford 2008) and audio-recorded interactions (40 h). During the lessons, I would typically sit at the back of the classroom taking notes, but also move among the students, endeavouring not to affect the interactions of the class, although my presence might have influenced what happened there (Levon 2013). I focused on moments when the content of the class centred on behavioural requirements and I also brought in supplementary information from informal discussions held between the teacher, the students and the language tutor. Translated formal interviews with some of the students (see details in Table 1) were also consulted to shed more light on those moments. Prior to the students’ participation in the study, formal consent was acquired with help from the Somali and Farsi language tutors. The students were repeatedly reminded that they could stop their participation in the study at any time. My presence did not seem to disturb them; conversely, they seemed to appreciate it.

After each day of observations, I transcribed and elaborated my field notes with the aid of the audio recordings (Delamont 2008). The analysis of data was performed through a bottom-up content analysis (cf. Braun and Clarke 2006). I regularly wrote conceptual memos (Heath and Street 2008), which revealed recurrent themes in the data that have also been investigated elsewhere (Winlund 2019, 2020, 2021). The data were coded manually in two cycles (Saldaña 2009). For this study, I paid particular attention to instances of practices and relations that concerned classroom behaviour. These instances were then grouped into three broad categories which comprised recurrent examples of similar types: 1) the chrono-spatial discipline in relation to the semiotic social space, 2) the use of literacy tools and practices, and 3) being a student in relation to others. The examples in each category were then analysed in accordance with the study’s research questions.

Results

The analysis of the empirical data is presented in the next sections, followed by a discussion.

Chrono-spatial discipline

The group’s instruction could be described as explicit and teacher oriented. Elisabeth often served both as generator and portal of this SSS by choosing and presenting the content of instruction and thereby offering the students access to it. Also, the SSS was extended beyond its walls through recurrent field trips, during which the students took turns taking photos to document the excursion. These selected images served as the basis for further instruction back at school, in addition to the students’ recounts of the trip. These practices, in which students’ experiences and choices were considered valuable and which generated some of the learning content, seemed to enhance their agency (cf. Garbutt, Biermann, and Offord 2012; Winlund 2020). The teacher’s instruction was also characterised by an openness, or contingency (Baynham 2006), to using the students’ experiences and linguistic enquiries in the interactions of the classroom.

The students needed to stay focused in order to follow what was going on, not least since the instruction was often accomplished in their L2. Elisabeth was careful to maintain strict and predictable routines (cf. Freeman, Freeman, and Mercuri 2001), explicitly stating the content and goal of ‘today’s work’ and constantly requesting that the students be on time and adhere to the rules of the classroom (such as not talking on the phone during lessons). Even so, lessons were frequently interrupted by students’ arriving late, visits to the school nurse or students’ unavoidable appointments with migration authorities, Social Services or dental care outside of school. These circumstances affected the instruction both as interruptions and as unsettling events. Thus, one important goal for the teacher was to make sure that the students were actually in class, not only as a disciplinary measure, but to promote their learning. Besides reporting their absence in the school’s computer system, this goal resulted in Elisabeth repeatedly calling the students’ homes or institutions (so called HVB-home, ‘home or care accommodation’—institutions for refugee children who have migrated on their own), insisting that they should come to school. Like the teachers in Lund’s study (2016), it is possible that Elisabeth transgressed her professional role by reaching out to the private spheres of the students’ lives, in order to make them participate in this particular SSS.

Punctuality was also a major issue during the whole school year, but particularly at the beginning. Elisabeth repeatedly commented on students coming in late and tried to make them apologise (in Swedish), to stress the importance of being on time. The teacher’s struggle seemed to yield results; after a month, Elisabeth’s class had the highest attendance rate of all the classes in level one, and other teachers commented on her students’ discipline and motivation. This practice now seemed to be accepted in the group, even though certain students continued to be late. Elisabeth stated that it was important for students with little prior experience of formal schooling to be present in the classroom, in order to learn school practices and to develop literacy: ‘Because they have to learn from me. They cannot read on their own at home. They have to see how I do it’ (Personal communication 5 February 2019). Unlike Gee’s affinity spaces (2005), where learning often takes place in a virtual sphere, the physical meetings between these students and their teacher thus appeared crucial. The students’ literacy development required complex multimodal support from their teacher, which demanded their physical presence (cf. Winlund 2020). Elisabeth also worked on the interpersonal relations in the group to create mutual trust between her and the students and to strengthen bonds within the group, which could also motivate reluctant students to come to school. These practices would seem difficult to maintain in a virtual space, particularly for students with emergent levels of literacy.

However, entering this particular SSS did not only include being present and on time in the classroom (cf. Freeman, Freeman, and Mercuri 2001), it also entailed being mentally present and learning to prioritise communication and activities connected to education. Mental presence included students turning off their cell phones, which was a source of repeated conflict, here addressed by Elisabeth:

Now I am going to give you some homework, but first I have to ask you guys who have problems with your cell phones. What should we do? Shall we put them in this box? The students say that they think they should, and so they do. (Translation of field notes, 26 September 2017)

Thus, the teacher suggested that the students focus more on the interactions in the classroom if they handed over their phones, to which they seemed to agree. At the same time, this digital tool represented an opportunity for learning: many of the students reported that they used their phones to translate words in order to understand. One of the boys, Zubeyr, showed me on several occasions how he watched films and video clips on his (hidden) phone, previously to learn English, and now to learn Swedish (for example via song lyrics). He also took part in live chat groups, which he (discreetly in the back of the classroom) demonstrated to me. When participating in these groups, he brought the outside into the classroom (cf. Baynham’s 2006) and could then get access to content generated by peers, which might have supported his learning and complemented the instruction. At the same time, he left the actual SSS and the instruction going on there, clearly breaking the rules of the classroom and deviating from its external grammar.

Bringing the outside in, which Baynham (2006) suggests might be helpful in the learning process, can also include bringing your worries into the classroom. Elisabeth seemed to avoid dealing with the students’ everyday problems in class to help them stay focused on the academic challenges of this SSS: i.e. to learn how to read and write and to learn more about school subjects. Even so, some of the students who suffered from previous traumatic experiences (cf. Ascher 2014) seemed to have difficulties staying focused or sometimes did not come to class at all. These circumstances were handled delicately by Elisabeth depending on each particular situation.

In conclusion, it seemed that, for several reasons, Elisabeth found it necessary for her students to participate in SSS and follow its external grammar, which could lead to the consolidation of some interactions and forms of learning at the expense of others. During the breaks, the students were given their phones and they were able to join other spaces.

Handling literacy tools and practices

The students’ participation in this SSS required their physical and mental presence in the classroom and their awareness of the literacy tools and practices demanded of them. The external grammar thus indicated how to handle the school material in order to learn the content, which was part of the internal grammar (Gee 2005, 219). These practices included saving and organising written text, whether in digital or print form, so that artefacts could be moved in space and time and students could work independently. One of the features of written text, which is prioritised in school, is indeed that it can be saved for further revision and development. In this actual context, computer skills were essential. Students had to bring their computers (which the school had lent them) to be able to do some of the exercises in the classroom. This included working individually with digital exercises in the textbook or writing texts that could be saved and sent to the teacher’s digital folders for correction. Some of the students, however, did not always bring their computers:

Zubeyr has forgotten his computer at home and Elisabeth shows clearly how upset she is: You have to have your computer, otherwise you need to go home and get it. The other teachers tell their students that they cannot be here without a computer. You have to have it. Did anybody else forget? (Translation of field notes, 12 September 2017)

Once the students understood the importance of this practice, Zubeyr and Amina on different occasions challenged the teacher humorously by pretending they had left their computers at home. Elisabeth’s response was to play-act having a heart attack or fainting, suggesting that the student had seriously broken the expected behavioural rules. This action amused the students. Humour was an important feature of the interactions in the classroom (cf. Winlund 2020), which deepens the rapport between teacher and students (cf. Lund 2016) and which seemed to enhance students’ willingness to accept the rules of the classroom.

The students needed not only to learn digital discipline but also to organise their analogue documents, which included paying attention to the school material and not destroying written documents or storing them in a disordered manner. Elisabeth explicitly showed the students how to organise papers in a folder in order to save their work for later use. Also, doing homework, on which the teacher insisted, was an important literacy practice. The students were encouraged to make an effort to remember new knowledge and to practise new skills, not least reading and writing, in a similar way to how they would practise playing football. However, it had to be done at home:

Fouad hasn’t done his homework but he’s trying to do it now. No, no. Absolutely do not do your homework in school, says Elisabeth. She collects the homework of those who’ve done it. Very good, Hamid! Elisabeth gives a high five to one of the students. (Translation of field notes, 16 January 2018)

The high-five in the example shows how Elisabeth encouraged conformity to the rules. It was made clear that the students needed to do their homework, but not in school, since this space was reserved for the practices going on there. Also, literacy learning included being quiet when the teacher or their peers spoke, waiting their turn, thinking before speaking, and also sitting properly in their chairs:

Now you can read after me and then you can write. Read after me, Adam, you need to have the text. Look, he’s sitting like this (imitating him sitting relaxed and leaning back in his chair). You have to look at the text and read at the same time. OK, now we are all set. [—] No but listen, this doesn’t work. You have to read the text and follow me, all the other classes can do this, you have to be able to do it too. The group seems to respond. (Translation of field notes, 27 September 2017)

This extract, as well as the examples above, indicated that these literacy practices seemed important, not only for learning the content, the internal grammar, in this actual SSS but because they represented school behaviours, or the external grammar that the students needed to master. Elisabeth here compares the group to other students with more schooling experience, in order to motivate them to work harder.

Being a student in relation to others

It is widely recognised that a respectful and caring relationship between teachers and students is important (Hattie 2009), not least when students struggle with school (Lund 2016; Bouakaz and Taha 2016). Concurrently, it also seems important for those students to relate to the teacher as a professional authority (Lund 2016). Consequently, the teacher might need to shift roles according to the situation. As the teachers in Lund’s (2016) study, Elisabeth had an affectionate relationship with her students, who expressed their warm feelings for her in interviews and often embraced her (cf. Winlund 2020). At the same time, she took great care to demonstrate her authority as a teacher, often expressing explicitly that she placed high demands on her students:

You are to write the text twice in your writing book. Can you look here. Tomorrow Elisabeth will have a look – if you haven’t written the text twice – pretends to slit her throat with her fingers – everybody laughs. (Translation of field notes, 19 September 2017)

The Somali students also seemed to have a close relationship with their language tutor, who collaborated with Elisabeth. He appeared to play an important role as another adult who could help the students interpret the linguistic and cultural practices of their new country, simultaneously representing a friendly face. His close collaboration with Elisabeth and their mutual respect may also have contributed to the students’ confidence in their teachers.

On one occasion, Elisabeth introduced the lesson with a discussion about the origin and meaning of everybody’s name:

Hamid objects: When will the lesson start? Why only names? Elisabeth: When you are a child you think that school is only reading and writing, but now it’s also listening and learning new words. Some of the students have taken out their computers to write but are stopped by Elisabeth. No, you can take them out and write later. The flow of the interaction is interrupted and Elisabeth is getting annoyed with Hamid’s continued questioning and asks the tutor of Farsi to tell him to be quiet: We have a lesson. I am the teacher, I decide. It’s tiresome when he’s questioning all the time. (Translation of field notes, 7 November 2017)

Hamid seemed impatient to learn and considered it a waste of time to talk in detail about names instead of working with the textbook. He was thus trying to negotiate the content of the lesson, the internal grammar, but failed to do so when the teacher explicitly set the rules of the classroom. In that sense, she not only served as a portal, giving access to specific content, but also as a gatekeeper, deciding what was appropriate to do in class, drawing on her long experience of teaching.

However, once the students had adopted the practices in the classroom, Elisabeth also allowed the rules to be broken. For example, after a few months, she was late on several occasions (being delayed by administration or by students who needed to talk with her); this surprised the students, but they accepted it. Furthermore, in the spring term, Elisabeth sometimes failed to correct their written assignments:

After the break, Elisabeth distributes the dictation workbooks. I haven’t corrected them yet. Amina responds Aja baja [a phrase that you normally use when children are being naughty, which Elisabeth had taught them]. Elisabeth continues: write, today it’s the … Other students now understand what happened: Not corrected? Elisabeth: No, I know, I was watching TV. Sumaya and Samia say No problem, teacher. (Translation of field notes, 25 January 2018)

Consequently, Elisabeth had broken the rules that students should write assignments and the teacher should correct them promptly; she was simply too tired revealing that a teacher’s private life also affects a teacher’s practices. Furthermore, Elisabeth sometimes successively consigned the responsibility of leading the group to the students:

Elisabeth: Now Hamid can be the teacher. Elisabeth a little bit tired – laughter. Hamid steps up to the whiteboard and takes over the exercise […] Good, says Elisabeth and continues: Very clever teacher. Yes, very clever. Next time, you others get to be the teachers. You know this. (Translation of field notes, 12 April 2018)

Consequently, the relations between the teacher and the students were negotiated and transformed over time in this SSS, but so were the relations between students. For example, Elisabeth regularly made the students change seats, which was not always a smooth process. On one occasion, Hawa did not want to change places, but was forced to do so. Adam also vehemently refused to move, but Elisabeth did not yield, stating: ‘I’m the teacher, I decide.’ Finally, Adam had to obey and move his things. Elisabeth explained the importance of these rearrangements to me: the students needed to learn to communicate with other peers, since this favoured their language development, encouraged cooperation with others and helped the students to get used to new situations, that is – the external grammar would give them access to the internal grammar. I observed that it appeared to create a sense of ‘camaraderie’ in a school environment, where relations are usually different from the everyday relations between friends.

Another characteristic of camaraderie in this classroom is competition between peers; for example, doing homework and achieving high scores after dictations, or participating in digital competitions. These were highlighted and given as a model to the other students. Elisabeth overtly praised students who succeeded and sometimes distributed gold stars to them. As Lund (2016) points out, this practice can motivate students who cannot yet obtain high grades but who are eager to be a part of the school system. The students seemed happy when Elisabeth praised them but others seemed sad not to receive praise. This quantification of the students’ knowledge was made significant as a way to stimulate them to work hard but it also represents recurrent school practices.

Consequently, the students were compared amongst themselves, and to other students in the school with more experiences of schooling. This comparison did not seem to highlight their deficits, but rather motivated them to work hard. Also, Elisabeth often told the group that their efforts were as great as, or even greater than, those of other students (cf. Winlund 2020), but that they needed to see how more experienced students worked – silently and individually with their computers – since this is expected from students in school.

Discussion and recommendations

This article focuses on the rules of schooling that many teenagers are familiar with, but which might be unknown to adolescents who have had little prior experience of school-based learning. The study investigates how behaviours and relations that are part of schooling are taught to this category of students. The purpose of this paper was to examine what Gee (2005) calls the ‘external grammar’, i.e. the thoughts, beliefs, values, actions and social interactions that are negotiated and established in a particular semiotic social space – one classroom, with one group of students and their teacher, in a language introductory school in Sweden.

The analysis of the ethnographic data revealed three categories of practices: the rules of time and space, how to use literacy artefacts and practices, and how to relate to other persons in school. The analysis also revealed that some rules were intended to provide access to the internal grammar – the content of instruction. For example, the teacher considered that literacy development was promoted when students were physically and mentally present in the classroom, did their homework, listened to the teacher, learnt how to handle literacy tools, and sat upright in their chairs in order to follow texts. Entering an order of camaraderie was also considered a beneficial opportunity for students to develop their language and social skills. Although some of these rules (external grammar) could be considered repressive, they did not only represent valued disciplinary measures required to succeed later but were also expected to stimulate students’ literacy development and give them access to the internal grammar of the context.

Some of these rules of the external grammar – particularly those concerning interpersonal relations – seemed negotiable. The teacher developed an affectionate relationship with the students, characterised by physical contact, humour and obvious solicitude, which seems different from the usual relations between teachers and students in ordinary classrooms in upper secondary school. It was also clear that she could be strict at times, not least in order to teach the students how to behave in relation to a teacher. At the same time, the teacher could break these rules, acting as a private person, or switching roles with the students when she let them act as teachers. Apparently, the external grammar was vaguer when it came to social interactions and revealed that both students and teachers were part of a roleplay. This ambiguity might be explained by the fact that these students could be motivated to enter the institution of school via intimate contact with the teacher, as presented in Lund’s (2016) study, and represented by humorous interactions and friendly hugs.

Entering this particular SSS seemed to require that students focused on the classroom, not on other spaces that might represent additional learning opportunities for them (Gee 2005). A reason for this requirement might be that these students needed particular focus and live contact with the teacher and their peers in this initial stage of schooling to support their literacy development (cf. Bartlett 2007; Winlund 2020). The teacher was often acting as a generator and a portal to the internal and the external grammar, but also at times as a gatekeeper, deciding what should be included in instruction or not. It might be argued, though, that individual students’ ways to literacy are different and could be taken even more into consideration (cf. Winlund 2021). For example, literacy practices outside of school, not least through digital media, could be brought into school and used for learning, as suggested by Baynham (2006). Students’ interests in digital communication could be used further as literacy resources and students’ attempts to negotiate the internal grammar could be taken more seriously. This approach could have strengthened the students’ agency and sense of coherence, but would also constitute a challenge to the teacher, who must consider the educational needs of the group as a whole. Also, it is clear that the teacher is consciously struggling to make the students focus particularly on the events of this particular classroom, no less important as a way to help students with experiences of trauma, which can affect their ability to concentrate and learn new things (Ascher 2014; Solberg et al. 2020).

Even if the students seemed aware of the external grammar and wanted to be a part of this particular space, some of them challenged the rules. For example, several students would arrive late, use their smartphones for personal use, make fun of their teacher by pretending to forget their computers, and not play along in the order of camaraderie with their peers by refusing to change seats at the teacher’s request. These instances may be signs of the students’ agency and, in some cases, their resistance to the external grammar; a social and cultural order that has been imposed on these students at a relatively late stage of their lives, and a way to manifest their individual identities and agency (cf. Baynham 2006).

This specific semiotic social space that was investigated in this study can be considered a subspace (Gee 2005) of the ‘real school’ that many of the students aspired to be part of later. One important question is whether the external grammar that was established in this space can be expected to apply in other classrooms too. The ability to follow the chrono-spatial rules and to handle literacy tools will certainly be useful in the students’ future education, as will the ability to relate to their peers as comrades in school. However, having an intimate relationship with the teacher might not be possible in future schools (cf. Lund 2016). This fact could explain why the teacher urges the students to take responsibility for their own learning and to master the rules of schooling.

Since the present study was limited to one group of students and their teacher, its results are not expected to be matched in other settings. Nevertheless, it was clear that the teacher not only taught the students the rules of this particular classroom, but also how to become future participants in the Swedish school system. The findings of this study point to some of the challenges that teachers might face when instructing students with little prior experience of formal schooling, while also bringing the practices into sharp focus, since these were often made explicit.

Future studies are suggested to investigate these students’ introduction to schooling in different educational contexts. Additionally, an analysis of the internal and external grammars in various semiotic social spaces (Gee 2005) would be useful to compare different pedagogical conditions and to discuss students’ agency in relation to their learning. Such explorations and comparisons are pivotal in these times of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity within educational institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The additional language is henceforth referred to as L2, although it might be students’ third, fourth, or other language.

2 At the beginning of the millennium, about 60 000 persons immigrated every year. In 2016 the total number of immigrants was the highest ever, about 163 000. The total population in Sweden is around 10 000 000. Consequently, strict restrictions on immigration have been established, which has led to a substantial decrease in the number of immigrants to Sweden (SCB 2020).

3 In Sweden, friendly physical contact between teachers and pupils is common and seen as acceptable, particularly in infant classes, but also in some cases in groups with older students, not least in the type of introductory school that is the focus here. This feature is analysed and explained in Lund’s (2016) study.

4 All the names in the article are pseudonyms and are also used in Winlund (2020 and 2021).