Policies, practices, and perceptions of minority language education: teaching Greek in Sweden

This project investigates minority language education in two parallel educational settings in Sweden: mother tongue tuition (MTT), which forms part of the national curriculum, and the teaching of language and culture in complementary schools, organized by local communities. From an international perspective, state organized MTT is rare.

Sweden thus offers a unique vantage point from which to study two distinct systems for organizing minority language education, and the knowledge production therein. As a case study, we focus on teaching Greek as a minority language. The project is based on three analytical foci and comparisons: policies, practices and perceptions.

We examine how Greek minority language education is constructed in policy documents and recontextualized in teaching practices, how language and culture are constructed in each educational setting, the role assigned to Swedish and other languages, and the language ideologies of parents, students and teachers in relation to language education in the two contexts.

The study draws on linguistic ethnography, and the data will be collected during the project’s first two years, by means of policy document analysis, interviews with teachers, families and other stakeholders and video-recordings of teaching sessions. The data will be analyzed based on discourse and interaction analysis.

The project aims to provide new theoretical and pedagogical knowledge and to push the state of art in studies of minority language education.