English as a threat, desire and support: language ideological frontiers in an introductory class in Norway

Abstract This paper investigates the values and functions ascribed to English by teachers and students in an introductory class and discusses the language ideological implications of these values and functions. The data are drawn from an ethnographic study in a Norwegian introductory class for newly arrived migrant students in a lower secondary school in Northern Norway (8th–10th grade). In this class, English is used as a lingua franca among students with linguistically heterogeneous backgrounds who do not yet share Norwegian as a linguistic resource. Regardless of previous experiences with learning and speaking English, students tend to associate English with positive values. Nevertheless, language ideological contradictions emerge: Educational policies construct Norwegian as the language of integration in Norway, and learning Norwegian is the educational aim of the introductory classes. From this perspective, English may be – and is – to some extent constructed as a problem. Yet, teachers also construct English as a heuristic in learning Norwegian, and students as well as teachers see English as a language that provides access to social networks, in effect reproducing the position of English as a central language for education and globalization. The article investigates these contradictory vales by drawing on theories of language ideologies, linguistic differentiation and power technologies. I analyse how English is erased as a multilingual resource and how the idea of English as a threat is recursively adopted into classroom discourses. The article conceptualizes the introductory class as a language ideological frontier where the ideology of Norwegian as the language of the nation-state clashes with the expansion of English as an everyday language.