LINGUISTIC MINORITY CHILDRENS COMPREHENSION OF LANGUAGE IN THE CLASSROOM AND TEACHERS ADJUSTMENT TO THEIR PUPILS PERFORMANCE - A NORWEGIAN CASE-STUDY

This exploratory study is an attempt to examine linguistic minority (LM) children's comprehension of the language used by the teacher in a fifth grade classroom of Norwegian and LM children. A further goal is to examine how teachers adjust their communication to their pupils' language competence. A language comprehension test was developed on the basis of two hours of recorded instruction on local history by the teacher. Both Norwegian and LM children were tested individually. A number of teachers were asked to evaluate the expected difficulty of the same test items for both groups. The results show that some of the LM children still have serious comprehension problems despite the fact that they were born in Norway and had all their schooling within the Norwegian school system. Words related to the physical context of the classroom and frequently used abstract expressions were well understood. Words less frequently used posed problems for the weakest pupils even in cases where the words were concrete and understanding contextdependent. The teachers correctly expected the LM children to comprehend less than their Norwegian classmates. However, they systematically accentuated the differences between pupil groups.