ABSTRACT
Today, more than 1.3% of the 5,471,000 inhabitants of Finland identify themselves as speakers of Russian (Statistics Finland 2016). The Russian-speaking population, the largest immigrant minority and the historical community, is ethnically heterogeneous. Even the Old Russians did not form a unified community. The Russian-speaking minority is officially seen as a resource and sometimes, but not often, feared as an enemy in residence.
While instruction in Russian as a home language is widely available and is the recommended option for those with a heritage language background (from day care up to university level), Russian-speaking pupils and students are not precluded from attending classes in Russian as a foreign language instead. Here the main target audience consists of pupils with no prior knowledge of the language, and the national core curriculum contains no specific guidelines for organizing the instruction and determining the assessment criteria for heritage language speakers within this type of class. Differentiating the instruction according to pupils’ individual needs and abilities is a general principle that teachers are expected to apply, but the actual arrangements may vary considerably. The goal of the article is to show the variative role of Russian, the spectrum of its use and specificity of teaching based on an analysis of documents. Finally, the chapter discusses dilemmas of identity facing Russian-speakers and the attitudes of the majority to this growing minority group rooted in the historic past as well as in attempts to build a secure political and economic future.
