Professor urges Icelandic schools to keep English out

Icelandic schools need a clearer policy for children whose mother tongue is not Icelandic, linguistics professor Elín Þöll Þórðardóttir told Morgunblaðið, in an interview published by mbl.is. She said English should be kept out of school activities as much as possible while children learn Icelandic alongside their mother tongue.

Þórðardóttir, a professor at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, said learning three languages at the same time was too much for children. She also argued that the school day should be extended so bilingual children would spend more time in an Icelandic-language environment.

Her comments follow the latest PISA results, which showed a significant difference in the performance of students in Iceland depending on whether Icelandic was their mother tongue. The gap widened more in Iceland than in any other country, according to the report.

Þórðardóttir said some Icelandic schools had classes in which most students had foreign backgrounds, while in some schools almost no child had Icelandic as a mother tongue. She called for students with foreign backgrounds to be placed in environments where Icelandic was prioritised.

She said there were examples of teachers addressing students in English. Children should be free to speak their mother tongue during breaks, she said, but Icelandic needed to be the main language in classrooms. English could be left out entirely during the first years of schooling, she argued.

“To learn Icelandic, you have to practise Icelandic,” Þórðardóttir said. She added that this did not mean children should stop speaking their own language, but that schools might need to reorganise their approach.

She also said some extracurricular activities in Iceland took place in English, including football training. Iceland’s education system had adopted an approach known as “active bilingualism” to support children’s mother tongues, which she said could help children understand and respect linguistic diversity. However, Icelandic needed to have a stronger presence.

Þórðardóttir rejected the idea that children learned Icelandic through their mother tongue, saying research showed they needed to learn Icelandic through Icelandic. She said a change in policy was therefore necessary.