Chris Hall (Joensuu) p.1-24
2007 Issue 3
Abstract
As a country whose main national language is hardly spoken outside its borders, Finland has always recognised the importance of foreign language learning. The official language education policy which has been in place in Finland for the last 30 years emphasises the importance of offering a wide range of foreign languages at schools so that the whole of the educated population has a command of Finnish, Swedish and English, and a sizable proportion also has a knowledge of German, Russian and French.
This language education policy has not changed. However, in recent years there has been a dramatic transformation in the languages taught at Finnish schools in that English gained ground at the expense of German and other foreign languages, the second national language Swedish is no longer an obligatory part of the matriculation examination, and that there has been an overall reduction in the number of foreign languages learned.
This trend also has repercussions for universities and other tertiary institutions. A government-sponsored report on the situation was published in April 2007, which lists a number of options for language education policy in Finland . This paper will analyse the current situation and trends in Finnish language education with special reference to German. A comparison is also made with developments in Sweden and the UK.