Högre seminarium i nordiska språk. Scarlett Mannish

Mother tongue instruction in theory and practice

This doctoral thesis examines tensions arising from the conceptual gap between Swedish mother tongue instruction (MTI) as an ideological object and as a practised phenomenon. As a form of state-sponsored opt-in education offered in over 180 migrant and minority languages to around 175,000 students, it is a rare example of a pluralist language policy arrangement. The idealisation of MTI in academic research and political policy over time – as a cure for “semilingualism”, as an apparatus to foster multilingualism, as an ideology of inclusion, as a free space carved out by minorities – stands in contrast to the daily implementation difficulties faced by MTI practitioners who are hard pressed to produce such large effects in under-resourced lessons of less than an hour a week. In four articles, of which the first two are discourse analytical and the second two are ethnographic, I demonstrate this gap, explain how it has discursively emerged, and analyse how it manifests in practice. Article one traces the concept of identity in the MTI curriculum. I situate its origin in the immigrant commission of 1968-74 into which it was deliberately imported from North American academic and political contexts as a conceptual alternative to discourses of “migrant adjustment”. Article two accounts for the rapid shift in political ideology represented in the 2019 and 2025 commissions into MTI by describing the assembly and conventionalisation of a register of denunciation for talking about it. Article three outlines the financial model for MTI, exemplifying how commodification processes affect teacher’s classroom practices through a comparison of private and public MTI provision. Finally, I outline some works in progress for the fourth article, with a focus on MTI students. I suggest some tentative conclusions as to the effects of the theory/practice divide and some thoughts on whether it ought to, or can, be closed.