The heritage language classroom as a cultural bridge with two-way traffic

The link between language and culture is well recognized among educators and language specialists. In the area of heritage language teaching, the culture in focus has typically been the one associated with the country or area where the heritage language is used as a first language by a majority of the population. It was, however, postulated by the present researcher that much of the cultural content taught in heritage language classrooms would also deal with the host country's culture. That would in no way be an undesirable situation, since it was seen as an excellent opportunity for young, recent arrivals to the host country to learn about the culture of their new country. The Ontario curriculum guidelines for heritage language programs state the students in these programs should also learn about Canada and the culture of this country. It would thus be reasonable to assume that heritage language instruction in Ontario would contain this kind of content to some extent, in addition to focusing on the heritage culture. That would, however, not be expected in heritage language education in Sweden, where the curriculum guidelines do not include instruction about the majority culture. If, on the other hand, this kind of learning still took place in the context of home language education, as it is referred to in the Swedish school system, one would expect this cultural information sharing to happen regardless of the curriculum guideline objectives. A case study was carried out in Sweden to investigate this issue. To allow for the possibility of different outcomes among ethnic groups, four different home languages participated in the study. They were Greek, Farsi, Spanish, and Vietnamese and were selected to represent cultures that were both very different from one another and from Swedish culture. The 477 students from participating school boards in the Stockholm and Gothenburg regions responded to 30 items on a questionnaire, each of which addressed a particular aspect of culture. In the analysis, the items were grouped into three cultural categories representing factual information, lifestyle, and cultural activities. The subjects were asked to indicate on a scale from 0 to 4 how much they felt they had learned about the heritage country and Sweden respectively for each of the 30 questions. The responses were then analyzed using pair-wise comparisons, frequencies, means, and factor analysis. Comparisons were made not only between the participating languages but also in terms of age and gender. School officials and teachers in Sweden were invited to provide feedback, as were heritage language coordinators at some Metropolitan Toronto school boards. The results show that the students perceive themselves to have learned about Sweden as well as their country of origin. This was most true for the factual information category. Among the language groups, the Greek students reported learning least about Sweden, while the Vietnamese students felt they had learned more about Sweden than about Vietnam. Of the other two groups, the Spanish speakers most often answered that they had learned equally much about both cultures. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)