The "optimism hypothesis" claims that immigrant students do better in the Norwegian education system than their socioeconomic status would suggest, due to the strong educational aspirations that immigrant parents might have for their children. Grounded in an educational equity paradigm, this study aims to test this hypothesis by…

For an Indigenous population, there is a need for an inclusive educational space from the language and culture srevitalisation perspective. This is especially important during the early years when the basics of the language are formed alongside cultural knowledge. This paper takes a closer look at a South Sámi preschool language learning…

Limited access to reading material written in local languages is considered a contributing factor to poor reading achievement in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several non-government projects are attempting to compensate for this by providing extensive reading material. One such project is the non-commercial, donor-initiated African Storybook. This article…

This study investigates how pre-service teachers (PSTs) negotiate an understanding of which multilingual practices are legitimate in mainstream education in Norway. Data were collected through seven focus groups with 24 PSTs participating in their first field placement. I designed three fictive vignettes about multilingual students in mainstream…

Bilingualism appears to be related to poor language and reading comprehension in the instructional language (L2). However, in the long term, an early age of second language acquisition (AoA) may produce higher levels of second language skills than a later onset of L2 exposure. Most studies on school-aged second language learners (L2 learners)…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

The present paper describes a contrastive study of interlanguage refusal strategies employed by Korean and Norwegian learners of English as an additional language. The data were collected from multilingual first-year students at an American university in South Korea and in an English-medium program at a Norwegian university by means of an online…

This article is based on a study of Southern Sami language learning in Norway. There are around 600-1000 Southern Sami living widely dispersed over a large territorial area in Norway. As an indigenous people, they have a right to instruction in their own language. The Southern Sami language however is in danger of extinction. The purpose of this…

Social psychologists have suggested that language-based ideologies related to "stereotype threat" (i.e. variations in performance-based on ability perceptions of language groups) may affect students' academic achievement regardless of school language support. However, it is unclear whether efforts to support students' first language…

The topic of this paper is literacy education and reading engagement in multilingual classes. What facilitates reading engagement in the language of instruction in multilingual classes? In this paper, we analyze reading engagement in a literature-based literacy program in Norway (2007-2011). The design was a research and development project in…

This article focuses on the features of Sami language instruction at the first school grades in Norway. The most important part is to describe what kind of challenges Sami language instruction at the first grades as an indigenous people's language and with the status of a minority language has. This situation introduces some differences and…

In a bilingual context, the mother tongue plays a key role in a child's social and personal development, in education and in second-language learning. There is a complex relationship between these three areas. Support for children receiving education through a second language is often in the form of additional learning opportunities in the second…

A Norwegian study of the effectiveness of teaching young children to read and write using their vernacular as the medium of instruction is reported. In 1980-81 and 1981-82, ten classes of beginning primary students were given all initial instruction in reading and writing in the vernacular. Because no language standardization occurs in the…