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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Translanguaging as a Key to Socially Just English Teaching in Finland

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This chapter discusses opportunities for multilingual and social justice-based pedagogies in the context of teaching English in Finnish compulsory schools. Recent changes in Finland’s national curriculum (FNCCBE, Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. English version 2016. Finnish National Board of Education Publications 2014/2016) promote a language-aware approach that is inclusive of students’ multilingual backgrounds. The document understands multilingualism as variation in any language system, including subject-specific languages, different modalities, and explicit language education. Against this backdrop, we ask: What opportunities for multilingual education are opened up and promoted by the new national curriculum? What is or could be the role of English as a subject, and particularly English teachers, in driving such pedagogies? Taking advantage of the relatively stable and dominant position of the subject English in Finnish schools, we explore opportunities for teaching English through frameworks that foster language awareness and equity in educational contexts (and beyond). Through an analysis of the FNCCBE that we complement with the voices of preservice teachers of English, we explore the interaction between multilingual pedagogies and educational approaches that promote social justice. Problematizing the common assumption that multilingual pedagogies are, by definition, equity-oriented, we ask whether and how multilingualism and language awareness may become stand-ins for equity pedagogies that fail to push for social change or self-critical and in-depth discussions of language in interaction with social factors and thus remain sociopolitically toothless.