In this paper we focus on upper secondary students’ language repertoire and reading comprehension based on their achievement on a reading test. We study students’ language background based on students’ reported home languages with a special focus on linguistic minority students’ difficulties connected to vocabulary, background knowledge and text comprehension. Our goal is to comment on the current situation in Oslo to exemplify the role of home and school language as learnings tools and instruments of social policies. Students in Oslo represent a diversity of cultural and language backgrounds, like students in other European capitals and large cities (i.e. Pfaff 2010). Today Oslo has 27 percent immigrant population of a total of 600 000. Oslo school authorities  claim that there are 40 percent language minority students in primary and lower secondary school based on reports on language background from the students and their parents. 24 percent of the students from grade 1-10 receive special education in Norwegian, while only 7 percent receive mother tongue education or bilingual support. Most schools with a high proportion of linguistic minority students are located in the eastern and southern parts of the city, while no school in the western part of Oslo has more than 25 percent. There is no corresponding information about students in upper secondary schools. However, plurilingualism, with a special focus on multiethnolects among teenagers in Oslo, was studied in the UPUS-project (i.e. Svendsen 2010) , as well as attitudes towards their mother tongue among some language minority students in upper secondary (Golden and Larsen 2007) , but the language repertoire of upper secondary students (grade 11-13) has not been thoroughly described.  

Language policies in Europe are strongly influenced by the notion that nations are, or should be, monolingual (Blommaert & Vershueren 1998), Norway being no exception.  Entorf and Minoiu (2004) compare the linguistic, social and educational background of linguistic minority students in Germany to that of linguistic minority students in other European and non-European countries with high proportions of migrants. They find that reading profiency scores of linguistic minority students improve when the language spoken at home is the national rather than a foreign language, concluding that home language is the decisive factor.  This conclusion contradicts the findings in recent research on individual plurilingualism that shows that plurilingual children practice a varity of verbal and non-verbal languages  to reach their communicative goals, also called languaging, translanguaging or code switching when they are out of parents’ control (i.e. Jørgensen 2003, Svendsen 2004). Globalization demands a redefinition of linguistic capital as global, national and personal resources (Taylor et al 2008), and multiliteracies capture the variety of literacy forms associated with complex pluralistic societies (New London Group 1996).  

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