Original scientific paper

Immigrant Danish – a Multitude of Languages

Jørgen Gimbel ; Center for M ulticultural Studies, Royal Danish School of Educational Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

The study deals with immigrant pupils' command of Danish word order. The respondents were 4th and 6th form Turkish, Pakistan and Yugoslav children receiving their education in or near Copenhagen.
It starts from the problem, focussing on the variation in educational achievement among children of immigrant workers and refugees; in this connection, three hypotheses are put forward. In the next section, the method, some examples of elicitation material are provided, co¬vering the most frequent deviations in the immigrants' Swedish and Danish word order. Under data, the example is described, and primary and background variables are provided. The statistical analysis included item- and multi-variate analyses. The results of the tests are outlined in table 1. No connection between, on the one hand, sex, age, school, and, on the other hand, command of word order, could be found. However, a correlation was exhibited, in varying degrees, between the occurrence of fully correct subtests and length of stay, nationality, and mother tongue respectively. Table 2 shows the percentage of pupils who answered all items in a given sentence type correctly. The respondents are divided into 3 groups of increasing command of word order. There follows a section containing the author's discussion, with the findings of this research supporting only the first and third hypotheses behind it, which are summarized under a), b) and c). It is assumed that the cause of the grouping of pupils is the social and educational status of their parents, while it could not be assigned to either nationality or mother tongue. On the basis of this result, which is considered as the most important, in the final section, educational perspectives, pedagogical developmental work including bilingual education is proposed, starting from the pupils' cultural and linguistic background.

Keywords

Danish language; immigrant children; mother tongue; Copenhagen

Hrčak ID:

128411

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/128411

Publication date:

30.12.1988.

Article data in other languages: croatian

Visits: 1.287 *