Abstract

Global migration has led to increasing numbers of children encountering schools as newcomers in their new countries. Statistics reveal that large groups of migrant children tend to perform poorly academically; thus, education for newcomers has become an urgent issue for host countries. The aim of this study is to explore how Norwegian schools facilitate education and social inclusion for newly arrived migrant children, based on qualitative data from separate programmes for newcomers. The findings show a large variation as to how the schools emphasise the teaching of subjects and how they facilitate active learning processes for newcomers. The analyses suggest that this variation, at least partly, is linked to a lack of clarity in the official Norwegian guidelines for the education of newly arrived migrant children. As far as inclusion is concerned, the schools, however, show quite similar results: none of them succeed in creating arenas for interaction between newcomers and mainstream peers. This may have an impact on the newcomers’ well-being, as well as on how fast they learn Norwegian—and hence school subjects—because the verbal and social interaction between language learners and target language users is crucial to the development of L2 skills.

摘要

全球移民导致越来越多的儿童作为新移民来到新国家上学。统计数据显示，大量流动儿童的学业成绩往往较差；因此，新移民的教育已成为东道国的紧迫问题。本研究的目的是基于针对新移民的不同项目的定性数据，探讨挪威学校如何促进新移民儿童的教育和社会融合。调查结果显示，在学校如何强调学科教学以及如何促进新来者的主动学习过程方面存在很大差异。分析表明，这种差异至少部分与挪威官方关于新移民儿童教育的指导方针缺乏明确性有关。就包容性而言，然而，这些学校显示出非常相似的结果：没有一家成功地为新来者和主流同龄人之间的互动创造了舞台。这可能会影响新移民的幸福感，以及他们学习挪威语的速度——进而影响学校科目——因为语言学习者和目标语言用户之间的口头和社交互动对于 L2 技能的发展至关重要。