MAPPING THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS OF NEWLY ARRIVED IMMIGRANT SCHOOLCHILDREN IN SWEDEN

Abstract

Sweden is one of the countries hosting the largest number of refugees and other categories of immigrants. In recent decades, the Swedish school system has been entered by a sizeable group of children who are at the same time learning a new language and acquiring new knowledge and skills in this language. The ongoing migration forces the Swedish education system to respond to the challenges associated with the need to integrate as soon as possible a fairly large group of students who do not speak Swedish and study at a Swedish school. The immigrant students in Sweden are a rather heterogeneous group with different levels of training, experience and needs. The Swedish National Agency for Education believes that it is necessary to improve the conditions for the integration of newly arrived students in the Swedish school system by better defining their needs. Since January 2016 an obligatory pedagogical mapping both of the newly arrived students’ language skills and of their knowledge in different school subjects has been introduced by the Swedish National Agency for Education. To this end, materials have been developed for mapping the experience, knowledge and skills of newly arrived students both in the field of language proficiency and in individual school subjects. The mapping should take place during the first two months of a student’s learning, and the result should be a profile of knowledge and skills that will be used to determine the students’ place in the Swedish school system and plan their further education. The article presents the approaches and methods used during this mapping, as well as the dual role of the mother tongue teacher as both a subject teacher and as a mediator between the school, the student and the family during the integration process.