Abstract
AbstractThis paper is concerned with a historical analysis of educational policies on Modern languages or second foreign languages (SFLs) like French, German and Spanish in Sweden. Using a typology from policy instrument theory, colloquially phrased assermons,carrotsandsticks, the paper provides an historical overview and a discussion of acess policy objectives and policy instruments since 1945 with a particular focus on lower secondary school the last 20 years. The analysis shows that while policies and policy instruments naturally have varied over the last 70 years, there are also similarities. A finding is that in the domain of SFLs, sermons have not been perceived as enough, carrots have tended to lead to inequalities and sticks have been avoided.
Highlights
This paper is concerned with educational policies on Modern languages or second foreign languages (SFLs) like French, German and Spanish in Sweden
This paper is concerned with educational policies regarding SFLs in Sweden with a particular focus on access policy, i.e. the question of who should study a SFL when and for how long
The elective status of SFLs like French, German and later Spanish has been fundamental in educational policies over the whole period, despite political and expert voices raised since the 1960s to make the subject mandatory in compulsory school
Summary
This paper is concerned with educational policies on Modern languages or second foreign languages (SFLs) like French, German and Spanish in Sweden. Current theoretical discussions of LAM typically do not separate between ‘types’ of languages (i.e. national, minority, heritage, foreign etc) even though some policy areas are potentially more relevant to foreign languages than others One such area identified by Kaplan & Baldauf (2005) which will be central to this paper is access policy, i.e. the question of who should study which language when and for how long. Persuasions or sermons involve informing the target population about facts related to the issue at stake through communication campaigns, labelling or educational efforts to make people understand the benefits of a particular behaviour It involves informing and reminding the public about what the policy target is, i.e. the objective to achieve. The discussion and conclusion (Section 4) will summarize the findings and discuss to what extent the underlying ideology with respect to SFLs in Sweden has remained the same over the years
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