Abstract #1698

Abstract: The Indigenous Sami people inhabit the northern most areas of Scandinavia and Russia and have suffered a colonial history with language loss as one of its severe consequences. In Sweden, in order to revitalize endangered Sami languages, there are five Sami schools. The schools follow a national Sami curriculum in which Sami and Swedish are two of the school subjects. The main goal of the curriculum is to strive for developing functional bilingualism. We examine the learning outcomes in the syllabi for L1 Sami and L1 Swedish. In order to find the discourses of language/s in the curriculum we couple linguistic analysis of themes and content, using Bloom's revised taxonomy of knowledge types and processes (Anderson et al, 2001) and Bernstein's concepts of vertical and horizontal discourse (Bernstein 1999). We show that the learning outcomes for L1 Sami are stronger focussed on oracy than literacy as opposed to L1 Swedish. There are more evaluation and analysis knowledge types, and more procedural and metacognitive knowledge processes in the L1 Swedish than in the L1 Sami learning outcomes. This reveals an underlying discourse of Sami as an oral language and Swedish as a language in which argumentation, criticality and strategies are important. We discuss how these results can be understood from the perspective of vertical and horizontal discourses. We argue that the curriculum does not provide a balanced distribution of and access to the vertical discourse in the two languages and therefore does not enable to develop functional bilingualism that is equal across languages.

Reference list:
Anderson, L., Krathwohl, D., Airasian, P., & Bloom, B. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing : A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

Bernstein, B. (1999). Vertical and Horizontal Discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 157-173.

Functional bilingualism and Indigenous language discourse in the syllabi of Swedish Sami