Coordinating, communicating, and combining languages in local immersion education policy reform in Finland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine local enactment of new curriculum policy, paying special attention to combining the language of instruction in the school (Finnish) and the immersion language (Swedish) in an early total one-way Swedish immersion programme in Finland at a programmatic level. The study combines ethnography with educational language policy by focusing on coordinative and communicative discourses surrounding local immersion curriculum. The participatory observation data consist of 36 hours of audio-recorded curriculum working group meetings with immersion teachers and researchers. The findings showed that the curriculum task assigned to municipalities and cities providing immersion education was extensive. They also revealed how discursively oriented policy research on immersion education opens up new ways to develop immersion education. The actual curriculum decisions implied that the Swedish portion of the immersion programme is multilingual and rich in connections between multiple languages, contesting the common belief of monolingual practices in immersion instruction.

Bilingual Science Lexicon of Pre-Serviced Primary School Teachers

“…We are not aware of other studies that have specifically analysed subject-related lexical acquisition, but the results are consistent with studies that consider the general development of L1 proficiency, in which lexis is a key element, carried out in other contexts by Bergroth [59] or Merisuo-Stomr [31] and in our context, by Barrios [32], although at different educational levels. These studies show that the fact of taking immersion or bilingual programmes does not negatively affect the L1 proficiency of students in these programmes.…”

Developing language-aware immersion teacher education: identifying characteristics through a study of immersion teacher socialisation

“…During the pre-service teacher education, one of the participants had oriented towards immersion, while the others had gained their immersion knowledge through in-service training (cf. Bergroth, 2015;Bonilla, 2017). We concluded that the general teacher education neither prepared student teachers for immersion instruction nor gave them an immersion teacher identity (see also Alisaari et al, 2019).…”

“…The socialisation in working life consisted of instructional and relational aspects, as well as advocacy. Instructional socialisation related to awareness of language(s) and to lack of materials (see also Bergroth, 2015;Peltoniemi et al, 2018). The need for additional pedagogical and linguistic planning started immediately when entering the profession and continued throughout their career.…”

“…Specialising as an immersion teacher includes socialising into the specific linguistic situation that high quality additive bilingual education entails (on language socialisation in general, see Ochs, 2000, on multilingual socialisation in education, see Meier, 2018). The need to build up literacy through the medium of two languages and through content and language integration are some of these specific features (Bergroth, 2015). As the pupils acquire the immersion language mainly through natural communication, the teacher has to plan classroom activities that support the language acquisition by drawing pupils' attention to certain linguistic aspects (Lyster, 2007).…”