The purpose with this essay is to study how students in elementary school are placed within the subject called “svenska som andrasspråk”, or SVA. SVA is a subject specially designed to deal with the complications that students with a different native language encounter when trying to learn Swedish. National school documents state that a student is to be offered SVA if he or she has a different native language than Swedish and if the headmaster decides it’s “needed”. In this work I focus on the different factors which are involved in the headmasters decision whether a student should be in a SVA-class or a normal Swedish class. The four factors I especially focus on is:
The method which is used in this essay is a combination of an analysis of the national school documents and interviews made with three elementary school headmasters in Stockholm. In the interviews I have used an interview method described in Birgitta Kullbergs Etnografi i klassrummet. In short this means that rather than using a couple of strict questions I have tried to approach the subject with broad and open questions.
The result of the study is that the decision process in which the students that are entitled to SVA are placed within one of the two subjects varies a great deal between the schools. The two factors that seem most important is the headmasters own opinion on SVA, and the students and parents opinion. It can be questioned whether SVA in it’s current form really serves the purposes it was created to serve.