Preparing Secondary School Students for using English at University: Curriculum Guidelines and a New Icelandic Linguistic Context

Abstract

Findings of recent studies on the status of English suggest that a new linguistic environment is emerging in Iceland. The studies uncovered a discrepency between the official status of English which is defined as a foreign language and the reality of the immense, daily English exposure and English use in Iceland. The vast majority of Icelanders hear, read and write conversational English daily which seems to lead to proficiency in informal rather than formal registers. This seems to lead to an overestimation of English skills as speakers are not aware of the difference in their capacity to receive and comprehend informal contextualized English, and to what extent they are able to produce English while speaking and writing, especially using more formal registers. This is apparent in recent studies that show that over a third of university students struggle with academic textbooks at the University of Iceland which are almost entirely written in English and the increased workload working with a second language entails (Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir and Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir, 2010). Many students claim that the English they learned in secondary school added little to the English they learned outside of school (Anna Jeeves, 2013). This paper will focus on the aspects of these studies that pertain to teaching and learning English at the secondary level, particularly with regard to preparation for English for use at university. The paper describes a follow -up study focusing on to what extent current national and school curriculum guidelines are in line with the needs of Icelandic students and their identified use of English in a new linguistic context in Iceland. Some inconsistencies were identified. The first part of the study examined the National Curriculum Guidelines for English in Secondary Schools that took effect in 1999 and 2011. There is little reference in these Guidelines as to how courses should prepare students for university studies in English. Upper level courses seem heavily focused on reading and interpretation of literary texts. The National Curriculum Guidelines from 2011 are based on proficiency scales and learning outcomes rather than descriptions of individual courses, the content of which are left to schools. This Curriculum is very general and open to interpretation, especially the highest, third level. As convention has it, there seems to be an overemphasis on literary genres at the upper levels. An examination of four school curricula based on the general Guidelines from 2011 does little to disspell this notion. One of the schools was chosen especially as it served as a curriculum development site for the secondary system in accordance with the 2011 Guidelines. The four schools offer courses with the stated aim of preparing students for academic studies, but yet again there is an overrepresentation of literature at the expense of other genres. The authors express concern that university students are not getting enough preparation in formal academic English and call for further studies of whether students lack of familiarity with academic genres are exclusive to English or whether they are symptomatic of a larger issue namely that students are not adequately prepared to tackle academic genres in any language. The overall implications are that the preparation of students may need to be refocused to include familiarity with the variety of genres, in English and Icelandic that they will encounter in their tertiary education and the workforce. This reexamination may be approriate as secondary education is being reduced to three years. The authors also call for a reexamination of teacher development and more support for working teachers to refocus their syllabi to better meet the needs of the growing number of students who go on to tertiary education.