Search results for "kieli"
showing 10 items of 2706 documents
Ambivalent English : What We Talk About When We Think We Talk About Language
2020
The ambivalence of English manifests itself in the discourses that surround it. English may be a resource and consume resources; it empowers and oppresses. The dichotomous discussion around the usefulness or dangers of English as a “global” or “world” language erases problematizations of the layered societal implications of English in localised contexts. English needs to be analysed not (only) as a language but (also) as the ideologies and societal structures intertwined with it. We examine English in two higher education contexts. Our first case deals with the so-called Accent Reduction courses offered for international students in US universities. The second one analyses English as a lang…
Investing in indigenous multilingualism in the Arctic
2018
Abstract This article explores the dynamics between language and identity categories and the boundaries produced in a changing multilingual, indigenous context in the Arctic region of Finland. In this moment of transition, indigenous multilingualism has high stakes. It can be a resource for political and economic development but also for management and regimentation, open to winners and losers. Drawing on a longitudinal critical discourse ethnography of producing language and identity categories in the Finnish Arctic, I discuss three circulating discourses relevant for the ways in which indigenous identity boundaries are made to matter, namely strategic, aspirational and affective multiling…
Exploring the cross-linguistic transfer of reading skills in Spanish to English in the context of a computer adaptive reading intervention
2017
ABSTRACTWe explore the potential of a computer-adaptive decoding game in Spanish to increase the decoding skills and oral reading fluency in Spanish and English of bilingual students. Participants were 78 first-grade Spanish-speaking students attending bilingual programs in five classrooms in Texas. Classrooms were randomly assigned to the treatment (i.e., where students played Graphogame Spanish) for 16 weeks for ten minutes per day (n = 3) versus business as usual instruction (n = 2). Results indicate that students at some risk on Spanish pseudoword reading appeared to benefit the most from playing the game. Analysis of gains suggests a potentially small, but meaningful educational effect…
Ohjeita, tietoa ja turvaa kielen keinoin. Ulkomailta palkatut sairaanhoitajat ammatillista suomen kielen taitoaan osoittamassa
2016
Advice, information and safety by means of language: internationally recruited nurses demonstrating their professional Finnish language skills he focus of this paper is on the professional language used by four internationally educated nurses working in Finnish in Finland. The data comes from a tailor-made professional language test module including integrated material-based tasks. The module was designed by the project Health care Finnish: developing and assessing Finnish proficiency among health care professionals (2014−2015) to complement the skill profiles based on the test results of the National Certifi- cates of Language Proficiency (NCLP) intermediate level test. None of the partic…
Reforming the national core curriculum for bilingual education in Finland
2016
This article explores the discourses surrounding the act of writing Section 10 Bilingual education in the new Finnish national core curriculum, which will be implemented in 2016. This section will set the parameters for programs that integrate language and content learning, where a minimum of two languages are used for instruction in content subjects. The main research questions discussed in this article are how and why certain discourses are expressed, or left unexpressed, in the final draft version of the curriculum. The data for qualitative analysis consists of participatory observations and minutes of meetings in the working group assembled for writing the draft.
Variation in the use of constructed action according to discourse type and age in Finnish Sign Language
2022
This paper presents a study of the use of constructed action (CA) in the stories and conversations of adult Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) signers of different ages. CA is defined here as a type of depiction in which a signer enacts the actions, feelings, thoughts and utterances of discourse referents with different parts of their body. Most studies on CA in sign languages have been done on the basis of signed storytelling, and little is known about how the use of CA varies in different discourse types. The use of CA has also been noted to vary between individual signers, but we do not yet know much about the socio-individual phenomena that may be linked to this variation. In the present stu…
Multi-sited and historically layered language policy construction: parliamentary debate on the Finnish constitutional bilingualism in 1919
2018
In this article, we analyse the construction of Finnish constitutional bilingualism in the aftermath of gaining independence, a traumatic civil war and during the construction of a new republican polity based on regulated parliamentarism in 1917–1919. We take a multi-sited and historically informed approach to the dynamics of political discourse at the parliamentary level, analysing the discursive cycles of people, nationality and nation. We demonstrate the interconnectedness of language policy discourses with historically and spatially multi-sited and highly complex contexts and show how language policy confrontations can add important dimensions to increase our understanding of power stru…
Measuring orthographic transparency and morphological-syllabic complexity in alphabetic orthographies
2017
This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn’t received much attention so far. This paper therefore reviews metrics proposed in the literature for quantifying orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, and morphological complexity of alphabetic languages. The review included searches of Web of Science, PubMed, PsychInfo, Google Scholar, and var…
Agent defocusing in two-participant clauses in Finnish Sign Language
2019
This article investigates what strategies are used for defocusing the agent in two-participant clauses in FinSL. The question is approached by analyzing a set of data that consists of videotaped informational texts. Several strategies for agent defocusing were found. First, the agent can simply be omitted. Second, the agent can be expressed with a pronominal pointing sign used non-referentially. Pronominal pointing signs that can be used non-referentially include at least the non-first person plural pronominal pointing sign and the first person singular pointing sign, possibly also the first person plural pointing sign. This study also suggests that constructed action is an additional, opti…
“You Can Stand Under My Umbrella”: Immersion, CLIL and Bilingual Education. A Response to Cenoz, Genesee & Gorter (2013)
2014
Classrooms the world over are full of people who, for different reasons, are learning additional languages and/or are studying through languages that are not their first. Gaining insight into such contexts is complicated for researchers and practitioners alike by the myriad of contextual variables that come with different implementations and make comparison and generalization a tricky business. We welcome Cenoz et al.’s (2013) article as an important contribution to the debate on how best to tackle this problem. In this Forum piece we would like to, however, redress the balance on two issues: the fact that terminologies have histories and the emphases on the research agenda suggested for fu…