Icelandic Children’s Attitudes towards Icelandic and English: What do they tell us about the teaching of Icelandic and English in elementary schools?

Abstract

The Icelandic language community has changed drastically in recent years due to rapid sociological and technological developments. On the social side, globalization, an explosion in tourism, and a rising number of immigrants have led to increased language contact between Icelandic and English. On the technological side, recent advancements, for example the enhanced usage of smart devices, tablet computers, and voice-controlled electronic equipment, have brought Icelandic into digital language contact with English. These changes were the motivation for the research project Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact (http://molicodilaco.hi.is). This three-year project (2016–2019), financed by a Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Fund, was awarded to Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, professor, and Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, professor emeritus, at the University of Iceland.

The main goals of the project were to construct a nation-wide profile of the amount of Icelandic and English input that Icelandic speakers of different ages receive, their attitudes to Icelandic and English, and their language use and competence in both languages. The project included an online survey sent to a stratified random sample of 5,418 speakers aged 3–98 in addition to in-depth interviews and further testing sessions with a group of 240 speakers selected from the participants in the online survey according to certain criteria. 724 children, aged 3–12, responded to the online survey, which was partly parent-administrated; 106 of these children were selected to participate in the indepth testing sessions. The 3–9-year-old participants were interviewed three times, for one hour each time, whereas participants 10 years or older were interviewed twice, for one and a half hours each time.

In this article, which is based on Ólöf Björk Sigurðardóttir’s (2020) MA-thesis, we focus on the attitudes of 40 children, aged 3–12, towards their native tongue, Icelandic, and the global language, English. The data comes from interviews within the in-depth testing sessions. The children were divided into four age groups: 3–5, 6–7, 8–9, and 10–12-years-old, respectively. Each age group included 10 children, 5 of whom received a lot of digital language input daily and 5 of whom did not. The results of the study suggest that Icelandic children in general have positive feelings towards both languages. A common theme in the children’s responses is that both languages are necessary for communication, although their domains are different. The children associate Icelandic with communication within Iceland, where everyone should speak Icelandic. On the other hand, they associate English with travel abroad, communication with immigrants in Iceland, who don’t speak Icelandic, and the discussion of certain topics. Thus, certain circumstances demand the use of English in Iceland, for example where not every child in the conversation group is fluent in Icelandic, or when the group is discussing such topics as English computer games or TV programs. The amount of digital language input the children receive daily does not affect their general attitudes towards Icelandic and English, although the children who receive a lot of digital input daily are the ones admitting to using English when playing computer games and using digital media.

Differences in attitudes towards the two languages surface most notably in the 6–12-yearold children’s answers to questions regarding schoolwork and the teaching of Icelandic and English in elementary school (grades 1–7). The children associate good knowledge of Icelandic with the teaching of Icelandic at school, where they learn to speak grammatically “correct” Icelandic. On the other hand, the children who receive a lot of digital input do not believe that they learn much English in school. They say they learn English in their spare time, from watching TV-shows on Netflix and YouTube, and from playing computer games. These results are consistent with those of previous studies, e.g., Hanna Óladóttir (2017), Ásgrímur Angantýsson et al. (2018), Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir (2010, 2018), Jeeves (2010), and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir & Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir (2018), indicating that 6–12-year-old Icelandic children believe that they have to have formal teaching in their native language at school, whereas some of them do not think they need formal teaching in the foreign/second language English, which they now learn extramurally through contextual learning. Children who receive a lot of digital input daily are more likely to say that they learn English in this way, and they are also more confident in their ability to speak English than children with less digital input. Overall, these findings indicate that a re-evaluation of the teaching of both languages in elementary school is called for. Thus, the approach to teaching English has to be more individualized since the status of English is now for some children more like that of a second than a foreign language. Moreover, the teaching of Icelandic should not focus so much on prescriptive standards, but rather emphasize the children’s knowledge of Icelandic, which is a modern living language.