For three weeks, from the 27th February to the 18th March (in week 9 to 11), Louise and I attended teaching practice at the lower secondary school Hagaskóli, which is lying in the Greater Reykjavik area. The school is one of two large schools within the Reykjavik area, which differ from the usual schools of Reykjavik, since these two only accommodate pupils from 8th till 10th grade, divided over a large amount of classes. Here it should probably be clarified that the youngsters usually are around 13 years of age when they begin in the 8th grade and 15 when they leave the 10th grade.
At Hagaskóli we exclusively taught Danish to three different classes during the three weeks. These classes were two 9th grades and one 10th grade. The teaching practice was executed in relation to a subject we are following at the University of Iceland, namely Daily language and expression in Danish, which specifically focuses on preparing future Danish teachers to include the oral language to a higher extent in the teaching of Danish, than it has been taught so far.
In Iceland Danish is taught as a secondary obligatory language from the 7th grade, which makes Iceland the only sovereign nation (that I know of) outside the Danish regency (which include the Faroe Islands and Greenland), to have obligatory Danish language teaching. That Danish is an obligatory subject in Iceland is something I had no previous knowledge of and at first found quite strange. The reasons given for this are that there to this day still are a large amount of Icelanders that travel to, study in and end up residing in Denmark, Sweden and Norway even though Iceland has been a sovereign state since 1944. Therefore, it is viewed as an advantage to also teach about other Nordic languages than Icelandic within the Icelandic school system. Also, Icelanders are major consumers of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian television series’ and movies, which they never dub but subtitle instead.
The fact that Danish language teaching is obligatory means that the majority of Icelanders have an at least general knowledge of the Danish language. Yet, this familiarity with the Danish language has for a long time been characterized by a primary focus on the written Danish language within the teaching of it, which have only begun to change within the last couple of decades. This means that most Icelanders can read and write Danish quite well but are reluctant to speak it, since they have had very little practice in doing so, which makes it extremely hard to learn, since Danish is generally written in one way and pronounced in another, unlike Norwegian for instance. This teaching focus did to a certain extent still seem to be the applicable at Hagaskóli, and in the classes that Louise and I taught in during the teaching practice, even though it was far from as singlehandedly a focusing on written Danish as previously mentioned. Therefore, we devised a teaching sequence that exposed our pupils to the Danish oral language in a manner so they both had a chance to combine the oral language to the written, they already knew, as well as to practice their own listening and speaking abilities. This was primarily done through a large amount of games which urged (and at times gently forced) the pupils to actively speak Danish within very relaxed and safe boundaries by using a vocabulary, that we either provided them with or knew they already knew of - in written form at least.
During our stay at Hagaskóli we got to experience friendly co-teachers and a bunch of fantastic pupils, which seemed to enjoy our focus on the oral language within language teaching, through our perhaps somewhat unconventional teaching, when they finally had gotten the hang of it. At first we almost had to lure the pupils into participating in our corporative learning inspired games, so that we could get them to use speak the Danish language. But as soon as they got the knack of it, and discovered that it actually can be quite fun to speak a second language even though you do not entirely master it, they jumped into the fray whenever we brought along new oral activities. The fact of the matter is that we actually think that the pupils learned a lot about the oral Danish language by using the spoken language actively, and we got a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience what it is like to teach about ones native tongue as a second language, something that few people from small populated nations ever get a chance to experience. Furthermore, we got to experience how all the school’s teachers and pupils arranged and executed an annual evening event where the school was opened to the public, so that parents and the surrounding community had a chance to experience the school and to support the two charities the school gathered money for that evening, through an extensive wary of activities and goods the classes sold. That evening Hagaskóli and the surrounding community gathered an astounding amount of 1,800,000 ISK which will be donated to help children suffering from cancer in Iceland and to help support orphans in Africa, through an amazing show compassion and solidarity.
Pupils selling espresso and cake to gather money for charity
More information (in Icelandic) about Hagaskóli in Reykjavik can be found at http://www.hagaskoli.is/
Esben
