Sweden is a multilingual country: in 2014, 23.8% of students in compulsory schools spoke languages in addition to Swedish. Over 160,000 individuals applied for asylum in Sweden in 2015 many of them children aged 7-16 with the right to education during the asylum-seeking process (Swedish Migration Agency, 2016). While Sweden has educational policies and programs in place to meet the needs of multilingual students, the exceptional numbers of recent arrivals has been a challenge to the educational system. In view of the changing linguistic landscape in educational settings, the aim of this colloquium is to critically analyze how new speakers in a range of educational contexts in Sweden are constructed in policy and practice.

To frame the four studies, the colloquium begins with a presentation of language and education in the Swedish context. Following this, the first paper examines compulsory school teacher education, specifically researching how teachers are prepared to meet increasingly diverse student populations. The study considers the perspectives of teacher educators and pre-service teachers in order to understand the ideological and implementational spaces afforded multilingualism in teacher training policies. The second paper explores tensions between conceptualizations and regulations framing languages as "mother tongues" and approaches to teaching Kurdish through the subject of mother tongue instruction to children in lower secondary school. The findings contribute to understandings of the new and traditional speaker dichotomy—a relevant issue in research on heritage or multilingual language education in all contexts. The third paper focuses on other new speakers in a Swedish primary school, namely language minority students enrolled in an English-Swedish bilingual program. As new speakers of both languages of instruction, these students may encounter particular challenges with academic content learning. However, results reveal how students resist language separation policies and legitimize their own language practices in the classroom. Finally, the fourth paper moves the focus to literacy education for adult immigrants. The study utilizes a critical sociocultural perspective on literacy and language learning to investigate how the “illiterate learner” is constructed in Swedish adult education policy and how the conceptualization is subsequently related to understandings of these new speakers as the Other. With our presentations ranging from primary school to adult education, we expand the view of the new speaker, by exploring categorizations and conceptualizations of new speakers and their language practices in Sweden. 

To conclude, the discussant will consider the themes presented by the four papers, focusing on the ways these empirical studies shed light on the range of issues surrounding new speakers in the Swedish context. This conceptual discussion will be briefly compared to similar challenges and possibilities in other contexts before we open the floor for a dialogue amongst the participating audience and the presenting speakers.