This article introduces the AFinLA-e thematic issue on plurilingualism in the school. Lately, multilingualism has been a buzzword in both sociolinguistic research and applied linguistics. Through the reform of national core curriculum for basic education, multilingualism, alongside language awareness, has also become an inextricable part of public educational discussions and the normative framework of basic education. There remain, however, questions about how all these changes translate into linguistically responsive classroom pedagogy and practices that support achieving learning goals, the process of language socialization, and pupils’ plurilingual identities. Our aim is to give a brief general introduction into the flourishing field of multilingualism research, its developments, approaches and trajectories, and describe the contributions that the articles in this issue make into the growing body of work in the Finnish context. We also identify three future trajectories for research on plurilingualism in the school.

Within sociolinguistics, perspectives to multilingualism have changed considerably during the last decades. At the same time, along the ‘multilingual turn’ in sociolinguistics and in language education studies, the number of available concepts to discuss multilingual repertoires and practices has increased very quickly. Notions such as translanguaging and plurilingualism have entered the linguistic parlance yet the actual nature of the change or its pedagogical relevance might be difficult to discern amid the diverse scholarly discourses where theoretical and practical concerns are tangled together. This article discusses the multilingual turn and its theoretical and pedagogical consequences by focusing on some broader, metatheoretical changes that have taken place along the so-called turn in language education studies. These changes in perceiving the essence of language, language skills, language learning and multilingualism are tightly connected with ideological changes within the field. I illustrate these ideologies and discuss their relevance especially for classroom pedagogy with newcomer students.

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using the forms ustāz 'professor, teacher (m.)' and miss 'miss, teacher (f.)' normally used to address male and female teachers, respectively. I will examine how address inversion is deployed to position participants both socially and interactionally in the school context. While address practices typically position the recipient from the speaker's perspective, address inversion functions more like a mirror that takes the recipient's perspective and displays the social position claimed by the speaker. As such, inverted address can be seen as manifesting intersubjectivity in the sense of the potential of seeing ourselves and our actions through the other's eyes (Mead 1934). By utilizing the notion of stance, my analyses focus on the way in which address inversion manages intersubjectivity by constructing the shifting relationships between the participants in classroom interaction. Background Address Inversion in InteractionAddress practices are one of the means for constructing social relations in interaction (Agha 2007: 278-300). With the choice of address forms, the coparticipants can, among other things, regulate social distance between them, negotiate the formality of the situation, and display affective stances (e.g.