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The complexity of the learning and teaching of EFLamong Swedish‐minority students in bilingual FinlandKAJ SJÖHOLMa Dept. of Teacher Education, Åbo Akademi University , Strandgatan, PB 311, FIN 65101Vaasa, Finland E-mail:Published online: 20 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: KAJ SJÖHOLM (2004) The complexity of the learning and teaching of EFL among Swedish‐minoritystudents in bilingual Finland, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36:6, 685-696, DOI: 10.1080/0022027041000229387

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CURRICULUM

STUDIES

, 2004,

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. 36,

NO

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Journal of Curriculum Studies

ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online ©2004 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0022027041000229387

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

KAJ SJÖHOLM

Taylor and Francis Ltdtcus100500.sgm10.1080/0022027042000229387Journal of Curriculum Studies0000-0000 (print)/0000-0000 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd0000002004KajSjöholmDept. of Teacher EducationÅbo Akademi UniversityStrandgatanPB 311FIN 65101 VaasaFinlandkaj.sjoholm@abo.fi

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

This paper discusses recent developments around the position of English asa foreign language (EFL) in the Finnish bilingual context, with a specialfocus on how these new trends are displayed in educational practices. Iconcentrate on the rapidly changing conditions for the implementation offormal learning of English in the light of Finland’s school legislation of the1990s and the curricular reform of 1994. The data reported on here areprimarily drawn from various studies with students representing the Swed-ish-speaking minority in bilingual Finland, though some reference is alsomade to Finnish-speaking students as well as to some international studies.

The premises for EFL teaching in Finland differ considerably from thosearound the teaching of other foreign languages.

1

English is widely visibleoutside the school context, as it is in many countries. This is most evident inthe area of entertainment, and above all in film, television, video, music, etc.,but also in information technology, as well as the press and radio. Englishhas also become the dominant language in a large number of domains suchas commerce, industry, sport, youth culture, tourism, and especially thelanguage of advertising for consumer goods. A command of English is anecessary tool for anyone who uses the Internet. English is also of consider-able importance in higher education as the

lingua franca

for scientific discus-sion (see Sjöholm 2001: 78). Thus, a ‘good’ knowledge of English is

Kaj Sjöholm

is Professor of Foreign Language Pedagogy in the Department of TeacherEducation at Åbo Akademi University, Strandgatan 2, PB 311, FIN-65101 Vaasa, Finland;e-mail: kaj.sjoholm@abo.fi. His research interests centre on second-language classroomresearch, multilingual education, and the cultural dimension of foreign language learning/teaching in language minority settings.

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considered an essential requirement for a career in all these fields. In otherwords, the spread of English has lead to an increased use of English for avariety of communicative functions by non-native speakers outside the class-room.

According to Hoffmann (2000: 11), the desire to become a participantin activities that use English may ‘provide the initial motivation to acquire[it], or the spur to become more proficient in that language’. This hasbrought with it highly positive attitudes towards the English language, whichhave in turn increased motivation to learn the language. However, ‘interna-tionalization’ and ‘globalization’ are more or less synonymous with ‘Ameri-canization’, meaning that the influence is mostly of US origin and that theAmerican English variant is the dominant one (see Sjöholm 2001).

Because of the new status of English as a

lingua franca

and its abundantpresence in mass media, what is the impact on language attitudes and class-room procedures? What problems stem from the ever-increasing culturaland linguistic diversity of the conditions for learning English in Finland?Does the incidental learning of English taking place outside the classroomresult in the same kind of proficiency as that resulting from formal classroomlearning? I argue that a dichotomy between the teacher’s classroom Englishand the learner’s incidentally-acquired mass-media English has arisenbecause schools tend to place higher status on the academic culture of liter-acy—which is relatively removed from the English-medium youth-cultureadopted by the learners. What kind of English proficiency does the complexlearning environment in Swedish-speaking Finland generate?

I also consider the relationship between the incidentally-acquiredEnglish outside the classroom and the formally-learned classroom English inrelation to Cummins’ (1979; see also Sjöholm 2004) distinction between

conversational

and

academic

language proficiency.

2

Cummins (2000) hasdeveloped his distinction in the light of research evidence collected over thepast 20 years, and has sought to respond to the critics who have addressedthe distinction. He has elaborated the pedagogical implications of hisdistinction in a figure made up of two continua, one representing the rangeof contextual support and the other representing the degree of cognitiveinvolvement in the language task or activity (see figure 1). The upper part ofthe vertical continuum consists of two quadrants (A) and (C), in which theconversational communication has become largely automatized, and thusrequires little cognitive involvement to become appropriately performed. Atthe lower end of the continuum, the academic functions of language repre-sent a high level of cognitive involvement, which is either supported by awide range of meaningful interpersonal and situational cues (B) or reliesalmost exclusively on linguistic cues to meaning (D). Here, I attempt tomatch data collected from lower- and upper-secondary school students inFinland (mostly Swedish-speaking) with Cummins’ concepts.

Range of contextual support and degree of cognitive involvement in language tasks and activities.

Source

: Cummins (2000: 58).

The third aim of this paper, which will be dealt with only cursorily, isto examine the potential of Finland’s new decentralized, school-basedcurriculum, introduced in 1994, for meeting the new conditions forformal and informal learning of English in the culturally- and linguisti-cally-diverse setting typical of Swedish-speaking Finland. The generalpurpose of the 1994 curriculum is defined in the

Framework Curriculum

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for the Comprehensive School

(

Grunderna för Grundskolans läroplan

1994)issued by the Finnish National Board of Education, where it says thatschools need to be responsive to their environment, and thus giving themthe freedom, opportunity, responsibility, and resources to determine anddirect their own affairs.

Language attitudes and motivation in ELT

In several theoretical models of second-language acquisition, language atti-tudes have been included as one of the crucial factors that influence second-language acquisition (Gardner 1985, Cargile

et al.

1994). Ajzen (1988: 4)defines attitude as ‘a disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to anobject, person, institution, or event’. Attitudes can be defined as evaluativeself-descriptions or self-perceptions of the activity of learning languages.According to Gardner’s (1985) socio-educational model, attitudes towardslearning a second language are expected to be related to motivation andachievement. However, the attitudes may be directed towards the languageas such, towards the speakers of the language, or towards their culture,towards the learning/using of the language in the classroom, or towards thelearning/using of the language outside the classroom (Sjöholm 2000: 126).

How is the formal and informal learning of English related to languageattitudes and motivation at lower-secondary and upper-secondary levels inSwedish-speaking schools in Finland?

3

Forsman’s (2000) study of lower-secondary level pupils’ incidental learning of English via mass media andtheir attitudes towards English showed that Swedish-speaking 8

th

-graders(15-year-olds) generally speaking have a more positive attitude towardsAmerican than British English. This, she believes, is at least partly due to the

Figure 1. Range of contextual support and degree of cognitive involvement in lan-guage tasks and activities. Source: Cummins (2000: 58).

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amount of English mass-media input learners are exposed to. Thus, shefound that the attitudes were more pro-American among students who hadencountered extensive English mass-media input (i.e. in the southern, urbanpart of Finland). However, Forsman also believes that her findings may wellreflect the general positive attitudes learners of this age tend to have towardsUS English and values. Because of the strong influence of US pop music,TV programmes, and films, British English may appear strange and old-fashioned to many students. This view may be strengthened by the fact thatthe great majority of the English teachers use British English in the class-room:

No, we learn British English and the pronunciation is impossible to understand.

We learn British English. I don’t like it. I use American English, I learn it frommusic and TV (Forsman 2000: 175).

By contrasting the kind of English students receive at school and thekind of language they actually wish to have, some interesting patternsemerged. Many students seem to want more English for everyday use:

‘Nice’ English. Not useful. No slang.

The way we learn English at school, nobody speaks that way for real inEngland or America.

Sometimes our English is too English. When you’re speaking normally tosomeone, you don’t use nice words like ‘Yes, indeed’ (Forsman 2000: 178).

These findings seem to suggest that Swedish lower-secondary schoolpupils make a sharp distinction between two rather different languagenorms. One of the norms stems from the exposure to authentic everydayEnglish speech, which the learners have picked up on their own via TV,music, and computers. This norm, which was clearly favoured by the learn-ers themselves, included colloquialisms and slang expressions. This studentkind appeared to equate this English with US English. The other norm was‘classroom English’, which sounded unnatural and bookish to the learners,and was associated with British English, partly because most teachers usedthis variety of English in the classroom. Another reason why some studentsexpressed critical views about classroom English may stem from the fact thatwritten material, which too often has a non-authentic ring about it, still tendsto dominate practice in the language classroom.

I found that Swedish-speaking upper-secondary school students (18-year-olds) were engaged in much the same English leisure-time activities asForsman’s lower-secondary students (Sjöholm 2000). Both Forsman’sstudy and my study indicated that attitudes towards using and learningEnglish are extremely positive among Swedish learners, even more positivethan towards learning Finnish. However, on the whole, the positive atti-tudes do not seem to stem from classroom experiences, but rather fromexperiences

outside

the school context. Furthermore, attitudes towardsusing English in speech, generally speaking, were more positive than theattitudes towards English in the classroom. However, the highly positiveattitudes towards US English and towards US values found amongForsman’s lower-secondary school students were not very obvious among

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the upper-secondary school students in my study: Britons were rankedeven higher than Americans on a scale measuring stereotyped attitudestowards five ethno-linguistic groups. These students, who are close to theNational Matriculation Examination, may also be more focused on theform-focused teaching and the classroom English (usually British English)offered by the teachers (see Shepherd 2000).

Features of English proficiency generated by informal and formal learning

I will now discuss some recent research on what kind of English proficiencyis being developed in a learning environment typical of Finland. First, itseems obvious that exposure to English language activities outside the class-room (e.g. mass media) will affect the learning process. Thus, Björklund(2000) found that primary school pupils had picked up a remarkablenumber of English words and phrases incidentally before they had receivedany formal instruction in the language. Most of Björklund’s pupils alsoscored quite well in an English listening-comprehension test.

In her study with school children (15-year-olds), Forsman (2000) set outto examine to what extent lower-secondary students’ exposure to mass-media input affected the development of their English proficiency. Hersubjects, Swedish-speaking learners, turned out to be great consumers ofdifferent English language activities, the most frequent ones being watchingtelevision/video and listening to music. Different activities with computers(e.g. e-mail, the Internet, computer games, etc.) constituted a third impor-tant group of English spare-time activities. Students in the western parts ofFinland (i.e. Ostrobothnia) spent 36 hours a week on English activities,whereas those in the southern region of Finland reported 51 hours (seeFigure 2).

4

Activities in English (hours/week) by type of municipality (Forsman 2000: 172).

Forsman (2000) found a positive correlation between the length of timespent on English leisure-time activities and preference for US vocabularyover British. To establish the lexical competence, Forsman used a testformat consisting of 10 word-pairs, one of which was American and theother British (e.g.

truck

/

lorry

). Her data indicated that the preference for USvocabulary was significantly stronger in the southern part of Finland wherethe students had spent most time on English leisure-time activities. Studentsthere were also more knowledgeable of the meanings of the words than thestudents in the west.

To sum up, Swedish-speaking learners are exposed to considerableEnglish mass-media input outside the classroom, although this input mostlyrepresents passive or receptive functions of language use. A considerableamount of input comes from watching television and, in that films andEnglish programmes are not dubbed on Finnish television and subtitles areoften provided in L1 (Finnish or Swedish), television exerts a very stronginfluence on the incidental learning of English. This strong influence has,however, created a linguistic demarcation between the language needs feltby young learners on the one hand and the views held by the somewhat oldergeneration of teachers. The use of non-standard forms and colloquialisms

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on TV and in computer games has caused many students to question thelanguage taught in the classroom. It becomes important that teachers, fromthe very start, give guidance on how to cope with different style registers ofEnglish in order to not add to the distance by expressing disapproval of orby censuring the students’ language (Forsman 2000).

What kind of English proficiency is being developed by Swedish learnersas a result of classroom instruction? In the following, the examples are takenfrom upper-secondary school and later. According to the students, theEnglish lessons in the upper-secondary school mainly consist of grammarand written exercises. This is rather surprising, considering the great empha-sis laid on communicative competence and oral proficiency in the newforeign language curriculum introduced in Finland in 1994.

Thus, Shepherd (2000) found that there is a considerable implementa-tion gap between the curriculum envisaged by educational planners and theone actually experienced by learners or estimated by external classroomobservation. Shepherd’s subjects comprised Swedish- and Finnish-speak-ing upper-secondary school students and some first-year undergraduatestudents (between 17–20 years). The data collection took place some yearsafter the 1994 curriculum had been introduced. Shepherd found thatexplicit form-focused teaching was very dominant in the classroom of bothlanguage groups. The national curriculum states that structures shouldmainly be practised in meaningful contexts, although it recognizes the

Figure 2. Activities in English (hours/week) by type of municipality (Forsman2000: 172).

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significance of linguistic competence and grammatical knowledge as anessential pre-requisite for developing communicative competence.

Shepherd (2000: 103) sought to explore to what extent the upper-secondary school classroom in both Swedish and Finnish classrooms inFinland were dominated by grammar-based teaching, written tasks, errors,and error-corrections, as well as translations. His Finnish- and Swedish-speaking student-informants strongly agreed that form-focused teaching wasa dominant feature in the upper-secondary school classroom, especiallyamong Finnish-speaking students. Shepherd also asked his student infor-mants whether there were frequent opportunities to use spoken English inclass: they said that Finnish-speaking students had very few opportunities touse spoken English in class, whereas Swedish-speaking students used spokenEnglish somewhat more frequently (Shepherd 2000: 107).

Shepherd obtained classroom observations, which showed similarpatterns, but the differences between Swedes and Finns were even greaterthan was suggested by the informants.

5

After categorizing classroom activi-ties into three groups, i.e. receptive skills, productive skills, and activitiesexplicitly focusing on language structure, Shepherd found that the develop-ment of receptive skills constituted one of the major features in the upper-secondary school classroom, especially in Finnish-speaking schools (seeTable 1). The productive skills occurred more frequently in Swedish-speak-ing classrooms, whereas Finnish teachers devoted more time to languagestructure.

6

In conclusion, a question to be asked is whether the incidental learningof English results in the same kind of proficiency as that resulting fromformal learning of English in the classroom. The findings I have reportedhere suggest that lower-secondary school students prefer a spoken, ‘conver-sational’ variety of English which they have picked up mainly via mass mediaoutside school. This type of English was sprinkled with colloquialisms andslang and tended to be associated with American English. However, it seemsas if older and more advanced learners of English have more positive atti-tudes towards the English used in the classroom. Thus, the attitudes towardsBritish English also become more positive, and student informants at theadvanced levels describe this variety of English as ‘neutral’, ‘prestigious’,‘sophisticated’, and ‘familiar from school’ (see Forsman 2004: 182).

Table 1. Receptive versus productiveskill-development according to classroomobservation.

Swedes Finns

Receptive 40.8% 42.4%Productive 43.7% 25.0%Structure 15.5% 29.3%Other 0.0% 3.2%

Source

: Shepherd (2000: 149–150).

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I argue that formal classroom learning at the advanced levels results insome kind of ‘academic’ English (see Sjöholm 2004). The proficiency of theadvanced learners has, however, certain features that make it different fromthe language of native speakers.

7

This impression of bookishness amongadvanced learners (as well as teachers) may be the result of an over-use ofrare, specialist Graeco-Latin words. The importance of these words tend tobe over-emphasized by many teachers (and advanced learners) who seethem as educational status symbols, but also as necessary tools for cognitiveand academic development. Corson’s (1995) observation that many teach-ers tend to see specialist Graeco-Latinate words as always ‘better’ or asalways ‘more correct’, especially in academic and formal contexts, may atleast partly account for this bookishness.

In terms of Cummin’s (2000) distinction of ‘conversational’ and‘academic’ aspects of language proficiency, there seems to be some evidencethat the incidental learning taking place outside the classroom is primarilybeneficial to the development of conversational proficiency, and especiallyto the development of receptive skills (Takala 1998). The Finnish curricu-lum stipulates a balance between developing conversational skills and otherlanguage skills supported by an awareness of the importance of being able touse different modes of communication (e.g. speaking versus writing). Fors-man (2004) argues that lower-secondary students’ negative attitudestowards the use of written language may reflect their greater knowledge ofan Anglo-Saxon-based lexicon used in everyday conversation and attainedvia the type of media content students most typically take an interest in asopposed to academic language proficiency with a vocabulary of Graeco-Latin origin which becomes more common in written texts as students moveup in grades (Forsman 2004: 158–159). Forsman also argues that there ismost sense in first satisfying the students’ need for conversational languageproficiency at the same time as making them aware of the usefulness ofdeveloping the ability to use Graeco-Latin vocabulary to secure academicsuccess.

Concluding remarks

In this paper, I sought, first, to identify the attitudes towards and the moti-vation for the learning of English inside and outside the classroom in theFinland-Swedish context and, second, to characterize the kind of Englishproficiency that is being developed in informal as well as formal settings. Ialso sought to discuss the central features in the 1994 curriculum with refer-ence to the rather complex conditions for formal and informal learning ofEnglish in bilingual Finland.

English is a popular language. Attitudes towards using English areextremely positive, possibly with a slight decline in later stages of learn-ing—but these positive attitudes stem primarily from outside the class-room, i.e. via the influence of English input that students have receivedfrom mass media. Especially at the lower-secondary school level, theattitudes were pro-American, and the US accent was preferred over theBritish. However, learners of English above the age of

∼

15 are less

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sensitive to the US mass media influence. Thus, I (Sjöholm 2000) foundthat, among 18-year-old upper-secondary students, Britons were rankedhigher than Americans on a scale measuring stereotyped attitudes towardsmembers of different ethnolinguistic groups. Lintunen (2001) also foundthat older and more advanced students had a fairly positive attitudetowards British English: they preferred the British accent over theAmerican.

What kind of proficiency of English does informal versus formal learn-ing generate? It seems that students at the lower-secondary level clearlyprefer a spoken, ‘conversational’ variety of English which they had proba-bly picked up on their own outside school. It also seemed that Swedishlower-secondary students were more familiar with the US vocabulary thanthe British. Forsman (2004: 158) found in a recent interview studyconcerning Swedish-speaking lower-secondary students that they oftenexpressed a dichotomous view of the English language. The English thatlower-secondary students encountered was either seen as a language usedpreferably in class and advocated by teachers or a language that theyencountered via mass media outside school. The classroom English tendedto be British English, following the norm of standard English, often in thewritten mode, whereas the mass media English tended to be the US varietyallowing colloquialisms and slang and was mostly in the spoken mode. Acommon feature was that many students wished for more practice of oralcommunication. Some students even questioned the appropriateness of theclassroom English offered by the English teachers. Forsman also found thatthere was surprisingly little awareness of the fact that different modes(e.g. written versus spoken language) and registers (e.g. standard versuscolloquial language/slang) exist in all languages and language varieties. Theview that students held about the language they used at school seems to beeven less differentiated compared to the view of the language studentsencounter mainly through mass media. Thus, the US variety of English ismore familiar in terms of different registers within the varieties. A wide-spread opinion among Forsman’s students was that slang is less used inBritish English than in American is interesting, and provides furtherevidence of the lack of knowledge and experience concerning differentregisters of British English (Forsman 2004: 158).

However, the influence of classroom English appeared to be much stron-ger at the upper-secondary level, i.e. after the age of 15. One explanation forthis could be that upper-secondary school students receive less English inputin terms of leisure-time activities. Thus, my study showed that 18-year oldstudents (Swedish-speaking) reported to be engaged in English leisure-timeactivities only half the time of Forsman’s lower-secondary students (Sjöholm2000). Another reason for this may be that language teaching in Finland isstill very much focused towards preparing the students for the matriculationexamination, a structure-based national language test taken by all Finnish-and Swedish-speaking students by the end of the upper-secondary school(see Shepherd 2000). Lintunen’s (2001) study showed that the great major-ity of Finnish university students wanted to speak English with a Britishaccent. It is hard to say whether these age differences depend on a tendencyamong younger teenagers to be more affected by popular youth culture, or

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whether these results also reflect a difference between what type of furthereducation students choose after the obligatory lower-secondary school(Forsman 2004: 182).

What Finnish pupils need most, however, is the ability to communicateorally (Pietilä 2001: 101). The benefits of increased speaking practice in theclassrooms are not restricted to the development of speaking skills. Conver-sation also provides an initial scaffold for more learning. The role of theteacher should be to mediate in the construction of meaning by learners, i.e.helping them to construct meaning from text. An ideal situation would thenbe to organize conversation as discursive practices in the literate culture ofthe classrooms, which, hopefully, would help students internalize and morefully comprehend the academic language they find in their extensive readingof texts (Cummins 2000: 80).

Such ideas have been implemented in Finland since 1991, when the newschool legislation made it possible to set up bilingual programmes of differ-ent kinds. Learning academic (i.e. subject-specific) content through aforeign language has become increasingly common at all educational levels(see Räsänen 2001: 197). The great majority of the experiments withcontent-and-language-integrated learning and teaching are content courseswith English as the language of instruction.

Notes

1. It may be assumed that the acquisition of other foreign languages primarily takes placethrough formal learning and schooling. In short, it seems as if the out-of-school exposureto foreign languages other than English is relatively negligible, thus leaving the L2 studentto resort to the drip-feed instruction typical of ‘traditional’ language classrooms (Sjöholm2001: 77–78).

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

3. So far, there is not much evidence of the development of attitudes towards English ormotivation 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 theyreceive formal instruction in that language. She also found that an overwhelming majorityof her respondents (i.e. 80%) showed positive attitudes towards English. In another studyat the primary level, Henriksén and Liljeberg (2000) found that the attitudes towardsEnglish 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 morepositive than towards Finnish (their second national language), but their study also indi-cated that the attitudes were more positive towards English as such than towards speakersof English or classroom English.

4. These differences by region were statistically significant, as were the differences betweenrural and urban areas.

5. Observations were made in eight lessons for each language group.6. Teacher interviews revealed that Finnish EL teachers foregrounded the teaching of EL

grammar because of the perceived differences between Finnish and English. The inter-views with Swedish-speaking teachers suggested that they devoted less time andresources to the grammatical system because of the relative structural similaritiesbetween Swedish and English.

7. Many researchers, in Finland and elsewhere, have pointed out that native speakersperceive advanced-learner language as bookish, pedantic, and non-idiomatic (see Ring-bom 1993, Channell 1994, De Cock

et al.

1998).

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