Exploring basic literacy education in Arabic for students with intellectual disabilities

The case of Mother Tongue Instruction in Swedish Adapted Upper Secondary School

Abstract

Students with intellectual disabilities who use languages other than Swedish at home have the right to study both their home language and Swedish as a second language in school. This study explores teaching of emergent literacy in Mother Tongue Instruction in Arabic at the Adapted Upper Secondary School in Sweden. The material analysed in the article comes from observations in one classroom with one teacher and New Literacy Studies has been used as a theoretical framework and literacy practices as the analytical tool. Whereas earlier research has shown positive effects of bilingualism on cognition, the results of this analysis show that both the teacher and the students struggle. The literacy teaching was not related to students’ everyday lives and as their proficiency was low, they are not likely to have much use of their literacy outside of school and the one-sided focus on literacy in the teaching means that the development of the students’ oral skills is not well supported. The conclusion is that for instruction in Arabic to be valuable for the language and cognitive development of students with intellectual disabilities, teachers need to collaborate, so that special needs teachers, L2-teachers and Mother Tongue teachers can combine their respective knowledge.