“Swedish children are more free in the classroom and communicate more in English. They have better pronunciation, know more words, and are happy to speak even about things other than their schoolwork. However, they often do not understand even basic grammatical terms such as subject and tense”.
Learning English is just as important in Sweden as it is in Vietnam, where the language is crucial to getting a job. Doctoral student Vi Thanh Son is working on a thesis on how children in the fifth grade are learning English and what they master, by studying classroom activities and having the children solve various tasks in English. So far, the results show that, in Vietnam, teachers and pupils are more controlled by predetermined lesson plans and detailed curricula. They often repeat after the teacher, and carefully follow up on the grammar they learned during their previous lesson.
“They memorise what they learn by heart and can also explain the rules of language. If you ask why it’s called ‘he knows’ instead of ‘he know’ they know why”.
The Swedish and Vietnamese children in the study are comparable in terms of English education in schools. They started learning English in the third grade and had studied English for two years at the time of the study. The difference is that the Vietnamese children receive additional private tutoring in English, while Swedish children have more contact with English outside school, through various media. The analyses are not yet completed, but the tendency appears to be that the Swedish children find it easier to communicate in English, while the Vietnamese children can describe the grammatical rules better.
Vi Thanh Son will complete her doctoral studies at the end of 2016 with a thesis with the working title: "Acquiring English as a second language: a comparison of learning and teaching English in Swedish and Vietnamese primary schools", and she will participate in the conference The Bridging Language Acquisition and Language Policy Symposium on 17–18 June.
Contact:
Vi Thanh Son, PhD in General Linguistics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
+46737213459
vi_thanh [dot] son [at] ling [dot] lu [dot] se
The Bridging Language Acquisition and Language Policy symposium – major international language conference in Lund
On 17–18 June, a major international conference on language policy and second language learning will be held at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University. The Bridging Language Acquisition and Language Policy Symposium in Lund will bring together researchers from these two different fields of research from. The symposium features 65 presentations of cutting edge research on language acquisition planning by scholars from a broad spectrum of polities: Armenia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Macau, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States. Together, these researchers have the potential to influence politicians and educators in many countries in terms of vision and language education.
Contact:
Francis Hult
+46462227726
francis [dot] hult [at] englund [dot] lu [dot] se (francis[dot]hult[at]englund[dot]lu[dot]se)