Bilingual Education: the view of pupils and educators.

Abstract: This study is about how children of early school age, specifically children who have both English and Swedish at home, experience a bilingual school system in Sweden. The study on the early student’s viewpoint of a bilingual instruction was narrowed down to an elementary school in Stockholm which proposes an English-Swedish bilingual education. This research revolved around information obtained from interviews with children and educators. The “field-work” approach provided a set of data which were analyzed and summarized in bars diagrams to have a clearer idea about the student’s experience and perspective of an English-Swedish bilingual education from a very early age. We have also studied how adults- educators, experience this Bilingual education. Our results show that English-Swedish bilingual children even at a very young age, experience English as an international language and are proud to have English as one of their languages. Our results also show that educational pedagogues experience that English-Swedish bilingual children generally are more flexible with language development and are more open to the world. From the children’s point of view, these results altogether suggest that bilingualism is influenced at a very early stage by the institutional language spoken in school, by the social arena and by the input parents have provided prior to school. From the educator’s point of view, the findings reported in the present study indicate a requirement for extra competence needed by the school personnel to support children with a bilingual background. The findings were collectively placed in the context of known literature in the field of bilingualism. Based on the above, the main conclusion is that bilingualism is an asset for children and a major advantage that allows a higher degree of flexibility in the learning process but requires close guidance by the school system.