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Sweden: Greens outraged by school language proposal
by Scott Gilbreath ~ February 2nd, 2009
A Swedish Liberal Party working group has proposed ending the policy of allowing students to study mathematics in Arabic, and the Green Party hits the roof.
“We are very skeptical toward the experiment taking place around Sweden right now, with maths being taught in Arabic. The risk is that it will worsen students’ development of Swedish language skills,” said Christer Nylander, a Liberal Riksdag [Parliament] member and head of the party’s working group on education policy, to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
The proposal has drawn criticism from the Green Party, which wants to give children and young people who come to Sweden from other countries the right to learn both maths and English in their mother tongue.
“It’s not only effective for teaching mathematics, but it’s also been shown to be effective for learning Swedish. The Liberal Party is going against everything they stand for with this idiocy,” Green Party spokesperson Maria Wetterstrand told SvD.
Exactly how does studying math in Arabic improve a student’s ability to learn Swedish?
Predictably, an ivory-tower academic opposes the Swedish-only proposal because it will hurt students’ feelings.
Carla Jonsson, a researcher at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism [...] at Stockholm University, thinks the ban would not only prevent learning in students’ mother tongues, but that their knowledge of the subject and of the Swedish language would also suffer.
“It would also send out the signal that minority languages aren’t worth anything and lead to students feeling a diminished desire to learn Swedish,” she told the newspaper.
Students who want to pass their courses and graduate will have a very strong desire to learn Swedish.
h/t: Torchlight
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February 5th, 2009 at 02:55 PM
[...] SWEDEN: Greens outraged by school language proposal …. [...]
February 6th, 2009 at 04:24 PM
Forget Math … How do you learn English in your mother tongue?