CEFLING: Combining Second Language Acquisition and Testing Approaches to Writing

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Twenty-first-century preschool bilingual education: facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts

Early childhood is a critical period in a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic and cognitive development, and preschool serves as the first transitional step from home to the wider socia...

Bilingual children as policy agents : Language policy and education policy in minority language medium Early Childhood Education and Care

AbstractThe current study examines bilingual children as language policy agents in the interplay between official language policy and education policy at three Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. For this purpose we monitored nine Finnish-Swedish bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years for 18 months. The preschools were located in three different parts of Finland, in milieux with varying degrees of language dominance. The children were video recorded during their normal daytime routines in early childhood education and care. Three types of communicative situations were analyzed: an educator-led small group activity, free play with friends, and an activity in which one child was playing alone…

Mitt i brytpunkten: Finska universitetsstudenters åsikter om svenskan

The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling : collaboration between bilingual families and pedagogical practitioners

Educational partnerships occur at the intersection of early childhood education and care (ECEC), families, and the surrounding community, and have been shown to play a significant role in student success rates in education. There is, however, a gap in research on the role and potential of ‘partnership’ in the case of bilingual families with children enrolled in monolingual minority language ECEC. This study aimed to fill this void by examining parental and practitioner discourses on partnership and on obligations, desires, abilities, and competencies involved in acting on a bilingual childhood in the context of monolingual minority ECEC. Parents in nine Finnish–Swedish bilingual families an…

Video calls as a nexus of practice in multilingual translocal families

This study explores how daily video calls were used by two multilingual family constellations to keep in contact with members located elsewhere. A three-stage data collection and analysis protocol was developed together with the two main participants, two single mothers each with a 4-year-old child. The results show that active collaboration among all members of the family was needed to get the activity going. The families employed a de facto family language policy where the focus was on successful communication and nurturing emotional bonds rather than developing language skills. At the same time, the regular video calls added a significant amount of time spent together and increased the a…

The Winding Road to Accessing the Voices of One Thousand Schoolchildren : A Nexus Analysis of Collecting Data for a Survey

This article describes a nexus analysis of the lengthy, complex process of negotiating access to schools for a research project surveying 1,002 children (aged 9–12 years) about their digital and language practices. The analysis distinguished layers of adult-centered gatekeeping, each of which needed to be tackled in sequence. Bottlenecks particularly arose at the gatekeeping stage, in which superintendents of schools decided whether to grant research access to schools. Factors facilitating the research process included the hybrid data collection design, the procedures for obtaining parental consent, and the active collaboration with the children themselves. A significant discourse emerged a…

Unity in Discourse, Diversity in Practice: The One Person One Language Policy in Bilingual Families

When parents with different first languages have a child, and want the child to become bilingual in both languages, many parents adopt the one person – one language (OPOL) strategy. This chapter uses nexus analysis (Scollon R, Scollon SW, Nexus analysis. Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge, London, 2004) to carry out a discourse analysis of ways in which this strategy is motivated by parents and ways it is enacted in conversations between parents and children, in three Swedish-Finnish bilingual families with 3–4 year old children in Finland. We also look at how the children participate in the negotiation of family language policy. Parents were interviewed about their own language…

Språkpolicy vid svenskspråkiga daghem i Finland: tvåspråkiga barns handlingar och agens

The aim of this article is to examine communicative actions of nine Swedish-Finnish bilingual children enrolled in Swedish-medium early childhood education and care in Finland. We discuss the interplay between declared monolingual language policy, and the ideology of supporting the language background of the bilingual child. As a result we found a dual practiced language policy. With the agency and actions of bilingual children we could identify both monolingual policy being practiced, but also a bilingual policy being constructed at the same time. Neither of the practiced dual policies seemed to be explicitly resisted either by the children or the pedagogical practitioners. The communicati…

Tusen och en röst : barn och deras föräldrar om familjen, språk och appar

Dynamics in Interaction in Bilingual Team Teaching: Examples from a Finnish Preschool Classroom

The current study aims to explore team teaching as it is manifested in bilingual interactional patterns in a preschool classroom in Finland. The data was collected in a preschool classroom where a bilingual pedagogy in Finnish (majority language) and Swedish (minority language) was implemented with monolingual Finnishspeaking children. Video recordings were made while two teachers with different predefined language roles were team teaching a class of 20 children during two circle times. A two-level analytic model was developed: on the macro level activity types, participant roles (type of leadership) and language allocation (the teachers’ relative use of Finnish and Swedish) were identified…

Formulerande av familjespråkpolicy - en gemensam, komplex och ständigt pågående process

This Is the Normal for Us: Managing the Mobile, Multilingual, Digital Family

Att utveckla en Jyväskyläidentitet: Undervisning på svenska i en finskdominerad miljö

I denna text görs ett nedslag i en svenskspråkig klass i en officiellt enspråkig finsk kommun (Jyväskylä i Mellersta Finland). Utav kommunens 131 000 invånare är ca 300 registrerade som svenskspråkiga. Den svenska klassen – som har funnits sedan 2003 i Pohjanlammen koulu – är en av nära trehundra svenskspråkiga skolor eller klasser som finns i Finland idag och följer samma läroplaner. Samtidigt är undervisningen på flera sätt helt unik. nonPeerReviewed

Assessment of Written Proficiency: Finnish-speaking University Students Writing in Swedish

Parental discourses of language ideology and linguistic identity in multilingual Finland

Finland is officially a bilingual country but it is in practice multilingual. In the current study, we examined how mothers and fathers of mixed-language families linguistically identified themselves and others, and how ideological discourses and concepts historically and socially situated in Finland circulated through the parents’ talk. The parents of three families in which at least Finnish, Swedish and English were used on a daily basis were interviewed. A discourse nexus approach showed that the concept of ‘mother tongue(s)’ played a central role and that although all family members were in practice multilingual, there was a strong tendency across the couples to identify themselves and …

Fräsande huvuden och passionerade eldar: Självporträtt gjorda av svenskstudenter

Inledning: Studenter som läser svenska som bi- eller huvudämne vid universitetet med sikte på att bli lärare har själva rikligt med erfarenheter av att vara inlärare. Med detta följer att man har individuella uppfattningar vad gäller språkinlärning och språkundervisning (se t.ex. Kalaja & Barcelos 2003). Huhtala (2008) fångade dessa uppfattningar hos en grupp direktvalda svensklärarstudenter genom narrativa analyser av studenternas egna skrivna berättelser. Hon kunde bland annat urskilja att studenterna hade olika upplevelser av universitetsstudierna, olika inställning till svenska språket samt synen på lärarens roll. Kalaja, Alanen, Palviainen och Dufva (u.u.) använde å sin sida enkäter me…

Svenskans situation i Finland. Lagar och utbildningssystem

Inledning: I Finland har två språk officiellt status som nationalspråk – finska och svenska. På så vis skiljer sig situationen en del från de övriga nordiska länderna. Situationen skiljer sig på flera punkter också från andra tvåspråkiga nationer (se McRae 2007 för en jämförelse mellan Belgien, Schweiz, Kanada och Finland). Andelen finländare med svenska som modersmål är drygt 5 % jämfört med 91 % som har finska som modersmål. Svenskan och finskan har dock en helt likvärdig status i lagstiftningen. Vidare läser alla elever i svenskspråkiga skolor finska liksom eleverna i finskspråkiga skolor läser svenska. I denna artikel berättar vi översiktligt om den finländska lagstiftningen och om sven…

När barnet blir expert: Förklaringar av ord och procedurer i det digitala spelet Growtopia

The ability to explain word meanings is central to a child’s language development and socialisation into different domains of language use. In previous research explanations have been shown to be linked to cognitive and linguistic development as well as academic language and discursive skills. This paper analyses what kinds of linguistic and discursive competences are put to use in explanation activities in interactions between an 8-year-old bilingual child (Albin) and his mother around a digital game. The data comes from a larger data set of video-recordings and field observation of children’s interactions around games. The analysis focuses on explanation sequences in which the child expli…

Finnish teachers as policy agents in a changing society

As policy agents, teachers are involved in representing and reproducing language education policies in their talk, practices and classroom interaction. Contemporary Finland and its education system...

What’s in the family app? : Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families

Communication within contemporary families is increasingly and to a significant extent mediated through technological devices and digital applications. Although the everyday reality of many multilingual families is permeated by technology, research on their digital and language practices has been scant. This article argues for the need for eclectic approaches that draw upon theories, practices, and findings from research on transnational families and migration, digitally mediated family communication, parental mediation, multilingualism online, and family multilingualism and language transmission. Two empirical case studies are presented on multilingual family constellations in Finland in w…

Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

This chapter discusses the importance of different types of early language education in the public system according to national policy in two geopolitical contexts: Continental Northern Europe and the UK. We define early language education policy as the language policies in early childhood education (ECE) including planning, practices, and ideologies related to the teaching and learning of languages. We present a variety of theoretical approaches and discuss their applicability to the field of early language education research. These approaches include traditional top-down policy implementation models as well as more dynamic and ecological theoretical approaches. Following that, we look at …

Designing and Assessing L2 Writing Tasks Across CEFR Proficiency Levels

Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher discourses on the trajectory of the development of the new approach; the concepts, places and people that were circulating in her reflections; and how these connected with larger societal discourses. The analysis showed that the teacher's new bilingual language practices demanded the renegotiation of previously held personal and professional beliefs. The te…

Future Prospects and Visions for Family Language Policy Research

This chapter takes the current state of the research field of family language policy (FLP) as its point of departure and discusses topics that need further attention in future FLP research in order to give the necessary attention to multilingual family constellations and the conditions that form them as we enter the 2020s. The first part of the chapter starts out with a discussion of the concept of FLP-making as a dynamic enterprise across time and space and then outlines three major themes that need further recognition: taking the perspective of the child, including (non-linguistic) emotions, and including the contemporary mobile digital context in the study of FLP. The second part of the …

”Pedagogik på två språk” : En beskrivning av användningen av svenska och finska hos en tvåspråkig pedagog på en finsk daghemsavdelning

”Pikkuhiljaa hem å äta” : flerspråkighet och multimodalitet i en familjechatt

Two languages in the air : a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices

Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish–Swedish and Russian–Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic–Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We found that in each context the teachers reported modifications to an initial bilingual education model over time: from a strict separation of languages, to flexible b…

Two languages in the air: a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices

This book article was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi:10.1080/13670050.2016.1184615 Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts), and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We fou…

Ödesfrågor för Svenskfinland? : Två tidningsdebatter från hösten 2015

Language policy, professional development and sustainability of multilingual approaches

Policies and professional development which focusses on pedagogical skills, beliefs, and agency are essential to ensure the sustainability of multilingual teaching approaches. This chapter begins with an overview of research studies on language policies, teacher agency and beliefs with a focus on multilingual settings. The intertwining of policy and teaching practice is then illustrated by means of the Finnish case, demonstrating how recent ECEC policies advocating diversity and plurilingualism have gradually changed teacher beliefs. The second part of the chapter focuses on professional development (PD) in so far as it is able to support teachers in implementing policies, changing pedagogi…