Norway – a case study

1. Norway – a case study Strasbourg, 16 October 2006

2. The language context • Norway – a multilingual country • Two varieties of written Norwegian • Acceptance of spoken dialects • Saami • Kven/Finnish, Roma/Romani • Mother tongues of recent immigrants • English from Year 1 • A second foreign language optional from Year 8

3. 2006 – Knowledge Promotion - A literacy reform • New curricula for all subjects, with clear competence aims • Basic skills to be strengthened through competence aims for oral, reading, writing, mathematics and digital skills across the curriculum • Reading and writing emphasized from Year 1

4. Norwegian as a Subject The objective: (…) A major aim for the teaching of Norwegian throughout the 13 years of schooling is linguistic confidence and belief in one’s own culture as the basis of developing identity, respect for other cultures, active social participation and lifelong learning. Four main subject areas: Oral texts, Written texts, Multi-modal texts, Language and culture

5. Basic skills across the curriculum • Being able to express oneself orally and in writing, to read, to do mathematics, to use digital tools • Examples: History, year 7: ”Prepare visual presentations of two or more river cultures using digital tools.” English, year 10: ”Describe and interpret graphic representations of statistics and other data.”

6. Competence aims Some examples: • Discuss characters and plots in fairytales and stories (Oral texts, after Year 2) • Discuss some esthetic techniques in multi-modal texts (Multi-modal texts, after Year 4) • Use personal reading experiences/responses when writing fiction and factual texts (Written texts, after Year 7) • Present results of in-depth studies of three selected topics: an author, a literary theme and a language topic (Language and culture, after Year 10)

7. Literature • Interpret and reflect upon content, form and purpose in a representative selection of contemporary texts, fiction and factual prose in the first-choice and second-choice Norwegian languages and in translation from the Saami language (Written texts, after First year of upper secondary education) • Explain how literature and other art expressions in and outside Norway have influenced each other during recent centuries (Literature and culture, after Second year of upper secondary education)

8. Norwegian as a Subject - Assessment • Informal assessment between Years 1 – 7 • Written examinations (national) and oral examinations (local) and grades after lower and upper secondary education • All the competence aims in the curriculum may be tested • From 2007 full-scale national survey of reading skills in English and Norwegian after Years 5 and 8

9. ConvergenceNorwegian – English • Explore and discuss how digital media influence and change language and communication (Exploring language and Text – English and Norwegian) • Read and present fiction and factual texts of your choice (Text and meaning – English and Norwegian) • Select and comment on media headlines/texts and present your own texts in different media (Text and meaning – English and Norwegian (bold types))

10. The next step • A White Paper on language policy and language education to be presented to Parliament spring 2007 • A broad discussion of all Languages of School Education