Browsing by Author "Polet, Maija"

Objectives. The aim of this study was to find out what kind of practices craft teachers have at their disposal to support the student in multilingual teaching groups, where communication in the language of instruction is challenging for the student. In addition, the views of teachers on a multilingual school and the consideration of multilingualism were examined. Teachers' practices were examined from the perspective of language aware teaching. Language awareness has been emphasized on national core curriculum (2014) as a part of school culture but meaning of the concept has been left quite open. Previous research on the subject shows that teachers experience uncertainty about how language-aware teaching is implemented in practice. Language awareness is often seen only as a component of studying theoretic subjects or languages. However, art and crafts contain their own subject-specific symbols and concepts where used language is also meaningful. This situation created a starting point for a study that sought to identify the ways in which craft teachers operate from a language aware perspective. Methods. The study was conducted as a qualitative study. The research material was collected through a semi-structured thematic interview with four craft teachers from the Helsinki metropolitan area. All interviewees have multilingual students in their teaching groups. The material was analyzed using the methods of theory-based content analysis. Results and conclusions. The interviews showed that teachers generally have a positive attitude towards multilingualism, which is one of the most important starting points for language awareness. The interviews revealed language aware ways of working, some of which can be used as such in the teaching of multilingual children and young people. According to the results, parallel language during the lessons was relatively low, although the use of different languages side by side is mentioned in the curriculum and is also one of the factors of language awareness.Teachers recognize their role as a linguistic model well and are also able to identify factors belonging to the language practices of the subject of handicrafts. The most surprising research result was the lack of co-operation with teachers of other subjects, although the basic idea of language awareness at school is language as a unifying factor in the teaching of all subjects.