We had our Swedish final exams yesterday. It was a strictly formal exam that held in the university’s examination hall – a separate building that was meant ‘only’ for exams, with test administrators and no teachers. It wasn’t very challenging as I had expected. I was hoping there would be an essay, at least a short one. But, no. There were some ‘fill in the blanks’, ‘choose the correct answer’, ‘organize the jumbled words into a sentence’, ‘read a passage and answer the questions’. It was disappointing, but maybe they didn’t want anyone to fail. The exam hall was filled with international students, mostly Europeans and a considerable number of North Americans, perhaps. And there were quite a few people who don’t fit into the category of ‘international/exchange students’, a little older, probably immigrants. Competency in Swedish language is a requirement to find better opportunities in the workforce, also to survive in the country since I’m not sure if the public services are offered in any other language.
As Min and I were walking back to the bus stop after the exams, Min told me that she was surprised about the context of the reading passage. The reading was a page-long story of a couple – the girl from Chile and the guy from Sweden, they met each other at a student party, fell in love, then decided to live together because they couldn’t live apart– first at the girl’s apartment, then with the girl’s dad in Chile and then with the guy’s parents back in Sweden. They eventually moved out to live on their own, and at some point decided to marry ‘officially’, not because they wanted to make their relationship official/legal but since they found it symbolic, and also because they wanted to have a party with their families and friends. At least, this is what I understood!! I mean, this whole story was in Swedish, and believe me, I’ve been learning Swedish only for 3 months. Min exclaimed that she’s surprised to see how simply, and how normally ‘the living together without marriage’ appears in the test paper. Like, this is how we do.., how else could it be. Something which is not so acceptable in South Korea, which I think would be frowned upon in Sri Lanka as well.
But that’s not what concerned me.. the question that struck me was, why was it there on the test paper? What disturbed me more was the last paragraph, which explained why the couple wanted to marry. Which also appeared as a question on the next page: why the couple wanted to marry? We were supposed to answer, I guess, they wanted to marry not because ... but that ... The preconceived notions about marriage, or how people ‘normally’ view marriage in Swedish society, I think, did not appear there unintentionally.
Few weeks ago, at a colloquium we had at the ‘Peoples of the Baltic’ course, few of my classmates presented papers analyzing the issues concerning the language tests in European countries, and how problematic/discriminatory they can become. For immigrants these language tests are very important, since they’re expected to pass the tests in order to acquire legal status/citizenship in the country, and to find jobs. As the papers described in detail, the goal of the language tests is not merely testing the language skills, rather they advocate standardized sets of values/phenomenon that are considered/understood/advertised as the European way of doing things, or ‘our culture’. The written tests and the interviews does not only test the respondents’ competency in the language, but interrogate their opinion about gays, women’s rights, or if they would accept ‘european liberalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘religion’. Like, everyone else living in the country has concrete, unanimous ideas about these concepts.
With this backdrop, I became quite skeptical about the passage in our Swedish final paper, was it included there purposefully to address a certain group/community? Or was it not?
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