The Process of Adapting Children to the New Linguistic and Cultural Environment

Abstract

The European Union (EU) promotes the use of multiple languages and the themes of multiple languages and multiple cultures in Estonia and other EU member states. The Estonian public curriculum (the National Curriculum for Basic Schools 2010; the National Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools 2010) contains important elements in the context of multiculturalism. Consequently, the goal of this report is to provide an overview of possible cultural and language-related obstructions between students, as well as between students and teachers in basic schools with multicultural classes. An additional topic is strategies to overcome such problems in those classes. The main goal is to present these problems in order to publish more widely the Estonian experience with teaching new immigrant students. As the research method, unstructured in-depth interviews were used.