Narratives of language and belonging - on immigrant-background children in rural Sweden.

This study examines children of immigrant background in rural Sweden and their narrated experiences of language and belonging, centralizing on the following questions: What aspects of the children’s narratives of daily life in and out of school assume significance in relation to language and belonging? What conditions and possibilities do the children tell us about? Theoretically and methodically, what are the affordances of working with a method such as children’s life stories? The study was based on life story interviews with 13 children at two schools in small-sized municipalities. The children were interviewed on three occasions. Some of the children (aged 9-13) were newly arrived and some were born in Sweden. Drawing on the fact that empirical studies on multiculturalism often confirm that there is a strong link between language, belonging and identity and that children in order to belong should feel that they can express their own identity and be seen as an integral part of the community where they live (Cummins, 2011; 2015, García & Wei, 2014), the study aimed at identifying the factors in their narratives that impact on their sense of belonging as well as the related conditions and means of action. In particular, the emotions related to the children’s positioning (Bamberg 1997; De Fina, 2013) were analyzed as well as the narrative resources employed in their narration. The results show that their sense of belonging is produced in the interplay between the conditions of immigration and the socio-cultural conditions in the small-sized community. The children describe extensive emotional work to enter into comradeship and in relation to language. The study discusses children’s experiences of language and diversity in terms of three interwoven and sometimes separate identity projects emerging in the children's narratives: the Swedishness project, the family project and the school project.