Teaching Swedish as a Second Language in the Early School Years

About the course

This course is for those who want to enhance their competence in teaching in a multilingual classroom. In this course, you will learn about how multilingualism functions on both a societal and individual level, and how policies and language planning influence language use in education and society. You will identify and discuss linguistic variation and attitudes towards linguistic diversity.

A big part of the course focuses on how the Swedish language is constructed in relation to other languages and what is particularly challenging to learn, both grammatically and phonetically, as well as how to assess a developing language. Furthermore, you will study how the acquisition of a second language occurs and what factors influence the process. The course also covers models for multilingual education, and the subject of Swedish as a second language is discussed from a historical and international perspective. You will read research articles that examine and describe methods for teaching multilingual children and practice making didactically sound choices regarding teaching materials. The course will broaden your competence to work with children from diverse backgrounds.