Language and culture teaching. Foreign languages and Danish as a second language

Abstract

This article deals with the teaching of foreign languages in Denmark as well as the teaching of Danish as a second language and with the possible links between the two fields in both research and practice. We focus on research projects from the 1990s, the most extensive in number of fieldworkers and range of data being the Koge project and the language teachers' project. The Koge project is a longitudinal study of the bilingual development of Turkish-Danish grade school children, and it is hitherto the most extensive study of Danish as a second language. The language teachers' project is an interview-and questionnaire-based investigation of Danish (and English) language teachers' perception of the cultural dimension of foreign-language teaching in the process of European integration. Foreign- and second-language teaching are often kept apart in our educational thinking. They take place in different educational settings and are based on very different teaching traditions. However, in order to develop theory as well as practice we feel that it is important to further collaboration between the two fields. In order to do so, it is necessary to discuss the two discourses of internationalization and social integration that are connected with the two fields. We return to this in the final part of the article where we touch upon a prototypical difference between second- and foreign-language teaching and discuss how the process of globalization is transforming this difference today. As a postscript we mention a national forum for mutual information between researchers and practitioners from both fields of language teaching in Denmark.