An immigrant mother’s thoughts on the use of Finnish in English workbooks

Abstract

I moved to Finland with my family three and a half years ago from Hungary. My older son (aged 11 then) spent a year in a Finnish preparatory class before he continued his studies in the 5th grade. He chose English as his A1 language because he had learnt it for three years in a Hungarian school. Despite his knowledge, the English home assignments proved to be very difficult for him to solve. The activity book relied greatly on the majority language: the instructions and many of the exercises required Finnish knowledge. We spent a lot of time using an electronic dictionary to do the English homework together. Finnish skills were needed even in the English language tests that he had to take, and it happened not just once that he lost points due to the lack of his proficiency. This personal experience made me curious about the reasons for the presence of the majority language in the English activity books that are used in Finnish basic education. The study is discussed in more detail in a paper published in the electronic journal Apples (Háhn 2017).