Mother Tongue Teacher Education in Sweden: Reflections on the Course “Russian Language Learning and Teaching” from a Multilingual Perspective

Introduction

Teacher education is a major contributing factor to the quality of teaching (Hattie, 2012), and the quality of teacher education needs to be a priority for educators. The quality of teaching seems to be especially relevant when it comes to the education of minority groups and multilingual children, since today’s world is becoming more and more multilingual (Fuller, 2013), with almost every third child in Sweden speaking both Swedish and another language (National Authority for Education, 2020). The multilingual repertoire of these children needs to be taken into account, as multilingualism is a great resource not only for the individual but also for the whole country. Special attention should be paid to the children’s mother tongue (MT) or heritage language (HL). In line with Rothman, we use the term heritage language to mean the language children speak primarily at home and acquire through interaction with naturalistic input (Rothman, 2009; Kupisch & Rothman, 2018; Rothman & Treffers-Daller 2014) in a “specific sociolinguistic environment” (Montrul 2015, p. 2). The HL is usually the weaker language of the child, yet, it is his/her native language (Montrul 2015, p. 4).

Most HL development and transmission take place within the family, and usually the HL does not have much institutional support (De Houwer, 2009; Park, 2011). Swedish is the priority for migrant parents and even though many of them state the importance of the MT, emphasis remains on Swedish (Ringblom et al., 2017; 2018). If we want to give more recognition to each of the child’s languages, the minority language should not be used solely within the family domain. Indeed, language needs to be used in many domains, including the more formal school domain. Important to this end is institutional support, as it supports HL transmission. Since the use of the minority language is often limited to one domain, language shift (Clyne, 2003) may be inevitable, and the majority language (Swedish) will replace the children’s mother tongue (Russian) in more and more domains. The quality, quantity and range of contexts all need to be taken into consideration (Paradis, 2004), and school should start playing a more active role in this.

Teachers who have multilingual children in their classrooms need to be trained in such a way that they can teach the children to draw on their MT as a resource. Educating teachers to work with linguistic minorities is challenging, and the education of Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) teachers in particular deserves more attention in the literature, since the teachers often lack the knowledge and resources that they require to work with multilingual children (cf. Ringblom, 2019). As early as 1987, Schön emphasized the mismatch between formal education and post-school life (Schön, 1987). Thus, teacher education should prepare students to solve problems that can occur in real life – that is to say, in school. Old solutions (especially those that teachers learned in their country of origin) may not always work. MT teachers of Russian are often equipped to work with monolingual Russian children born and raised in Russia who acquire Russian as L1 but not with children who are born and raised in Sweden who acquired Russian in contact with Swedish, in the situation of limited input in Russian (cf. Ringblom, 2012).