Much research has been conducted in adult second language learning through interaction, but knowledge about the child language learner has remained scarce. To address social language development in middle childhood, the article presents a longitudinal case study concerning a nine-year-old L1 Russian-speaking learner of Finnish. The data consist of 48 h of video-recorded lessons. By examining requests, the article demonstrates how a learner’s actions built on interaction, the affordances of the local context and embodiment, and access to multiple languages identifiable as Russian, English, and Finnish. The analysis focuses on the very beginning of language learning and the middle of the academic year. Through a detailed analysis of multimodal interaction, the study demonstrates the progress from simple language such as free-standing nouns and adjectives to more complex language in actions such as requests constructed as clauses by the focal learner. In addition, the analysis enhances understanding of the development of multilingual competence in interaction. Finally, the results indicate that learning a language is intertwined with embodied interactional competence and growth in linguistic repertoires.

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.

This article examines teachers’ views (N = 2,864) on school multilingualism. The results have been analyzed using statistical methods and the conceptual frameworks of Spolsky’s language policy and Ruíz’s language orientations. The respondents were divided into three groups: positive (18%), deliberating (34%) and cautious (48%). The teachers’ language orientations were analyzed using three sum variables: teacher’s use of multiple languages, student’s use of multiple languages, and schools’ language attitudes. Classroom teachers were more positive about multilingualism than subject teachers and there were more teachers with cautious attitudes in schools where the number of foreign-language pupils was less than 5%. Additionally, the attitudes to multilingualism were more permissive in Swedish-speaking than in Finnish-speaking schools. Overall, the analysis of teachers’ views suggested that language policies vary. Finally, the individual respondents’ views did not fully correspond to any of Ruíz’s formulated language orientations.

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This article focuses on touch, talk and embodied resources as a means of directing participants’ attention to a focal point in a pedagogical task. The data are drawn from a corpus of approximately 150 hours of video-recorded lessons from primary and lower secondary classrooms in monolingual and multilingual settings in Finland. The data were scanned for episodes of touch that occurred between teachers and students in relation to an ongoing pedagogical agenda. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we identified a complex multimodal gestalt (CMG; Mondada 2014a) consisting of touch followed by a deictic pointing gesture that occurred within an ongoing pedagogical activity. We present three excerpts from different pedagogical contexts that involve such a CMG as a means of directing a recipient’s attention to a pedagogical task. The CMG is relevant for managing attention within an ongoing learning task. We show how this CMG provides parallel participation frameworks without competition for the speaker, and argue that it is a technique for bringing together the teacher, student and content in ways that encourage the recipient’s attention to the pedagogical content. This analysis contributes to the growing body of studies on haptic sociality, especially in the institutional context of education.