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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

‘More teachers needed’ to cut long waits for Swedish classes

More Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) teachers are needed to cut waiting times for foreigners wanting to learn the language, a new report by Sweden's education authority suggests.

Published: 19 April 2017 17:09 CEST
'More teachers needed' to cut long waits for Swedish classes
An SFI class in Täby. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

Foreigners are entitled to free SFI lessons in the municipality where they are resident. Under Swedish law classes should start either three months of the date they register at a permanent address in Sweden, or for those who are part of Sweden's national plan to help refugees get established in the country, a month after they apply to a course.

But almost half of the municipalities that responded to the survey said they are failing to meet these deadlines, according to a new report produced by the National Agency for Education, Skolverket, on behalf of the education ministry.

A total of 111 municipalities told the report's authors they currently have a queues for SFI classes exceeding the stated target time. Around half of those said the waiting times were between one and four weeks. Five municipalities reported the longest waiting times, five to six months.

The number of people taking Swedish for immigrants classes has increased sharply in the past decade, from some 50,600 in 2005 to 138,000 in 2015, and is expected to continue to increase on the back of Sweden's record intake of refugees in the past couple of years.

According to Skolverket the number of people qualified to teach SFI has not grown at the same rate as the number of students. “The lack of teachers in SFI is significant and it is difficult to recruit,” explained Anna Westerholm, head of Skolverket's department for curriculum directives, in a statement.

“Many municipalities solve this with larger teaching groups and flexible teaching hours, that is daytime hours as well as evenings and weekends. But long-term measures are required to among other things increase the supply of teachers. Skolverket also needs to offer support to those municipalities that need it.”

Skolverket suggests a series of measures to plug the staff shortage, including increasing the number of distance courses for people who want to teach Swedish as a second language and offering more funding to municipalities or schools offering SFI classes. It also suggests closer cooperation between the national jobseekers' agency Arbetsförmedlingen and local authorities to help new arrivals integrate faster.

Sweden's minister for upper secondary school and adult education, Anna Ekström, told The Local that work is already under way to plug an overall teacher shortage in Sweden, including SFI teachers.

“I think it is a big problem, and it's many problems on top of each other,” she said. “The government requested this report because there is a concern of the supply of teachers in general, and [SFI students] is also a group that has grown in the past few years.”

“Learning the language is important to get a job in Sweden or to complement your degree and also just to be an active member of society. The longer you have to wait to learn the language the longer it takes you to get established in Sweden.”

READ ALSO: Asylum seekers 'face years' without Swedish lessons

READ ALSO: How Sweden wants to improve schools across the country

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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Le Havre rules: How to talk about French towns beginning with Le, La or Les

If you're into car racing, French politics or visits to seaside resorts you are likely at some point to need to talk about French towns with a 'Le' in the title. But how you talk about these places involves a slightly unexpected French grammar rule. Here's how it works.

Published: 30 November 2021 13:04 CET
Updated: 4 December 2021 17:47 CET
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre.
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre. It can be difficult to know what prepositions to use for places like this - so we have explained it for you. (Photo by AFP)

If you’re listening to French chat about any of those topics, at some point you’re likely to hear the names of Mans, Havre and Touquet bandied about.

And this is because French towns that have a ‘Le’ ‘La’ or ‘Les’ in the title lose them when you begin constructing sentences. 

As a general rule, French town, commune and city names do not carry a gender. 

So if you wanted to describe Paris as beautiful, you could write: Paris est belle or Paris est beau. It doesn’t matter what adjectival agreement you use. 

For most towns and cities, you would use à to evoke movement to the place or explain that you are already there, and de to explain that you come from/are coming from that location:

Je vais à Marseille – I am going to Marseille

Je suis à Marseille – I am in Marseille 

Je viens de Marseille – I come from Marseille 

But a select few settlements in France do carry a ‘Le’, a ‘La’ or a ‘Les’ as part of their name. 

In this case the preposition disappears when you begin formulating most sentences, and you structure the sentence as you would any other phrase with a ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’ in it.

Masculine

Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)

A good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. 

Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition

Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.

Because Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris). 

For place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this:

Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet

Je suis au Touquet – I am in Le Touquet 

Je viens du Touquet – I am from Le Touquet 

Je parle du Touquet – I am talking about Le Touquet

Le Traité du Touquet – the Le Touquet Treaty

Feminine

Some towns carry ‘La’ as part of their name. La Rochelle, the scenic town on the west coast of France known for its great seafood and rugby team, is one such example.

In French ‘à la‘ or ‘de la‘ is allowed, while ‘à le‘ becomes au and ‘de le’ becomes du. So for ‘feminine’ towns such as this, you should use the following prepositions:

Je vais à La Rochelle – I am going to La Rochelle

Je viens de La Rochelle – I am coming from La Rochelle 

Plural

And some places have ‘Les’ in front of their name, like Les Lilas, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. The name of this commune literally translates as ‘The Lilacs’ and was made famous by Serge Gainsbourg’s song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a ticket puncher at the Metro station there. 

When talking about a place with ‘Les’ as part of the name, you must use a plural preposition like so:

Je suis le poinçonneur des Lilas – I am the ticket puncher of Lilas 

Je vais aux Lilas – I am going to Les Lilas

Il est né aux Lilas – He was born in Les Lilas  

Islands 

Islands follow more complicated rules. 

If you are talking about going to one island in particular, you would use à or en. This has nothing to do with gender and is entirely randomised. For example:

Je vais à La Réunion – I am going to La Réunion 

Je vais en Corse – I am going to Corsica 

Generally speaking, when talking about one of the en islands, you would use the following structure to suggest movement from the place: 

Je viens de Corse – I am coming from Corsica 

For the à Islands, you would say:

Je viens de La Réunion – I am coming from La Réunion 

When talking about territories composed of multiple islands, you should use aux.

Je vais aux Maldives – I am going to the Maldives. 

No preposition needed 

There are some phrases in French which don’t require any a preposition at all. This doesn’t change when dealing with ‘Le’ places, such as Le Mans – which is famous for its car-racing track and Motorcycle Grand Prix. Phrases that don’t need a preposition include: 

Je visite Le Mans – I am visiting Le Mans

J’aime Le Mans – I like Le Mans

But for a preposition phrase, the town becomes simply Mans, as in Je vais au Mans.

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