This presentation concerns the state of limbo multilingual children often find themselves in with respect to language support or special needs support. For many years there has been a debate in Sweden centered on the assumption that exposing young children, especially those in need of special support, to more than one language will cause confusion and delays in the learning of any language. Yet it is now well documented that children who learn two languages simultaneously can succeed, if exposure and learning opportunities for both languages are maintained. Since 1977 municipalities in Sweden have been required to provide first language education for all children with mother tongue languages other than Swedish. Although there is more than 30 years of providing education to multilingual pupils the area is relatively weakly regulated and established in pre-schools and schools and municipalities are not sufficiently aware of their responsibilities. Cases exist where students with language needs are treated as special needs students and vice versa. According to the latest report from the National Agency for Education, children with immigrant backgrounds receive lower scores on standardized tests than children with Swedish born parents and fewer of them attain an acceptable level in Swedish/Swedish as second language, Math and English - the subjects necessary for proceeding to high school. Research on the importance of using mother tongue as a tool for learning a second language as well as learning other aspects of the curriculum has contributed to an increase in first language tutoring as a support for multilingual children. This tutorial support in the first language is an intervention regulated within an act of law for special support and one must apply for it. The same act of law governs special needs support. One consequence of having the same law governing both language needs and special needs is that it leads people to misconstrue them as essentially the same. As Sweden’s cultural and linguistic diversity continues to increase there will be greater demand for teachers competent in bilingualism in order for them to correctly evaluate every child’s specific support needs. The question therefore arises how do we properly distinguish language needs and special needs. This is crucial as we know that to facilitate and maintain language development in both languages children must consequently be sufficiently exposed to both their languages in a way that is adapted to the individual child.

The presentation is based on an investigation from 2007 concerning teachers’ sense making of first language tutoring and bilingual education, as well as the educational aims of bilingual education at schools. The data were obtained from interviews of 25 educators in seven upper secondary schools and high schools in different Swedish municipalities. An observation that emerged in the course of the project, but which was not its focus, was that schools had problems in characterizing pupils’ needs. This part of the material was reanalyzed in order to develop an extended research project on how multilingual children’s support needs should be met. This second analysis was based on a post-structural approach in order to find underlying power dimensions of discourses emerging in the meaning making processes.

Some of the results from the original study, relevant for inclusive education, was that the provision of bilingual tutoring as a legal right often becomes overly formalized, to the students detriment. This formalization has given rise to blunt tools for assessing as well as action packages not taking into consideration how needs interrelate in complex adaptive ways. There was an obvious risk that children in need of language support were sent to special needs teachers and bilingual teachers had to cope with pupils with special needs as if they merely had language difficulties. Furthermore the system appears to construct the child as either bilingual or different without considering broader environmental and intercultural factors or those power relations creating hegemony of ruling forms of language. A conclusion is that there is a need for further investigation on how to facilitate possibilities for giving bilingual pupils relevant support.