Málfríður - 15.05.2002, Page 30

There is no use
trying to deny
the position of
English as the
language of
power and cul-
ture and put
another lan-
guage in its
place in the cur-
riculum as the
first foreign lan-
guage.
30
The great reform 1965-70
From 1965 to 1970 there was a great
reform in the school system of Iceland. As
in the other Nordic countries the division
between the academic and the practical
lines was taken away. Every child in
Iceland should have the right to attend a
9-10 years’ undivided “primary school”
(grunnskóli).
Combined with that was a significiant
reorganisation of the teaching of Danish.
The language policy behind it was clear:
The social-democratic minister of educa-
tion wanted to promote the knowledge of
Danish to fight the trend towards English
which was connected to the USA and the
Conservative Party. Besides, English was
connected to popular culture, but Danish
to high culture.
The implementation was methodolog-
ically sound:The start was as early as pos-
sible, in the 4th grade (10 years old), and
the materials developed emphasised the
oral approach — exactly as our experts say
today.
But it did not work. The reform was a
fiasco.You can go out for yourself and try.
Most Icelanders at an age of about 35
have had 7 years of Danish in school if
they had secondary education and 5 years
if they did not. I can assure you that their
Danish is not as good as that of two gen-
erations earlier.
In 1979—84 I made an investigation of
the reform. It was clear firom that that the
pupils were frustrated. They had a feeling
of reaching a rather low level and after that
making no progress. The teachers were
frustrated too. The indications were not
clear, but it was considered the only solu-
tion to start later, in the 5th or 6th grade.
Ten years later the last step was taken:
It was decided that Danish no longer
should be the first foreign language, but
the second after English; that the teaching
of Enghsh should start earlier and that of
Danish later — but that the two languages
should have the same total of teaching
lessons in the primary school.
Learning from history
During these last ten years we teachers of
Danish have become better at approach-
ing the pupils, and today when the teach-
ing of English has been put in its “right”
place I feel confident about our teaching.
What went wrong? What can we/you
learn from that story?
About the curriculum:You cannot cre-
ate a different world with a curriculum.
There is no use trying to deny the posi-
tion of English as the language of power
and culture and put another language in
its place in the curriculum as the first for-
eign language.
About the methods of teaching: In
teaching a language which is not the lan-
guage of power and culture you have to
make your success in the classroom itself.
You cannot rely on other sources of moti-
vation than your own teaching.
Good teaching
The first thing is that the teacher must be
able to speak the language shamelessly and
fluently. That was certainly not the fact
about Danish in the primary school in the
70’s. It is not a problem to teach Enghsh
with a shabby mastering of it because the
pupils will learn it anyway from other
sources. But when the classroom is practi-
cally the only place where the pupils
experience the language, they rely on the
teacher.
The second thing is that teaching
must be oral as much as possible. Of
course the pupils know that they can just
as well speak English with speakers of the
language in question.We all know that it
is all right to speak English to a German.
That is not the reason. The reason is that
without the oral teaching we do not pre-
sent a sufficient amount “language” to
the pupils in the limited time we have.
When the amount of language around us
is very little, the amount of language in
the classroom becomes crucial to the
learning.