Venekeelsete gümnaasiumide üleminek eesti õppekeelele eesti- ja venekeelses Delfis 2007—2011

Date

2012

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Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

The Transition of Russian-language Secondary Schools to Estonian-language Tuition in Estonian and Russian Delfi 2007—2012. Keywords: mediaspace, educational change, bilingual education, Russian-language schools, transition to Estonian-language tuition. The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis was: • to compare the manner of how the topic of educational change was mediated in different mediaspaces, based on the example of Estonian and Russian Delfi; • to analyse the inner cultural-communicative specialities of two different mediaspaces, based on the example of the individual understandings of internet commentators in Estonian and Russian Delfi. The empirical material consisted of articles and internet comments published both in the Estonian-language and Russian-language news site Delfi. All articles and comments were published between 7 June 2007 and 31 August 2011, and they were focused on the transition of Russian-language schools to Estonian-language tuition. 117 articles in Estonian and 298 articles in Russian met those criteria. I picked 100 articles from Estonian Delfi and 100 articles form Russian Delfi to form a sample for a standardised content analysis. However, I narrowed the sample even more to analyse the internet comments. I chose eight pairs of translated articles, which had 477 comments in Estonian and 902 comments in Russian. According to the results, the coverage of Estonian and Russian Delfi was the bulkiest from autumn 2010 to summer 2011. During this period particularly, but also in some instances before, politicians dominated as the main sources in both news sites. The Ministry of Education and Research, and local government politicians expressed their standpoints the most. At the same time, the opinions of Russian-language secondary school headmasters, teachers, students, and parents often remained overlooked. Both in the articles, and in the internet comments, problems were discussed more often than advantages in connection with the transition. Furthermore, negative opinions were a little bit more common in Russian Delfi than in Estonian Delfi. The shortage of Russian-language secondary school teachers with sufficient Estonian language skills was seen as the main issue. The strong opposition to the Minister of Education and Research among Russian-language Delfi’s commentators also indirectly pointed to negativity towards the transistion. Commentators expected from many other participants of the educational change to adopt the standpoints of some certain lingual community’s majority. Based on the fulfilment of those expectations, commentators sometimes concluded, whether those participants wanted to belong to that community or not. For example, when some Russian-language secondary school headmasters had agreed to accelerate the transition, it was interpreted, in some instances, as if the headmasters had turned their back on Russian students, teachers, and parents, or to their community in general. To sum up, although, there were various differences between Estonian and Russian Delfi, the two mediaspaces were not strictly separated, but they also had many similiraties both in their media coverage and internet comments.

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