Browsing by Subject "Class teachers"

Finland is officially a bilingual country; having Finnish and Swedish as its national languages. However, in 2022 more than 9.79% of the population had another language as their home language (Statistics Finland, 2023). Despite the continuous increase in the use of other languages as home languages, research shows that monolingual practices are a norm in Finnish classrooms due to teachers’ lack of preparation and knowledge (Alisaari et al., 2019a; Shestunova, 2019). The research task of this study is to analyse the type of preparation that Finnish class teachers get to address multilingual situations, as well as define how translanguaging, a specific approach to multilingualism, is conceptualised in Finnish teacher education. The study consists of an individual interview and a focus group where four participants discussed. The participants were teacher educators who work and do research in different Finnish universities. Interviews were analysed using an inductive content analysis approach, where five categories and 57 codes were identified by using a constructivist paradigm. It was found that class teachers do not get enough preparation to address multilingual situations in Finland. Class teachers feared not having their classroom under control and the potentially problematic use of languages other than Finnish. Moreover, the contents learnt at the university were not related to enhancing the use of every language in class, and translanguaging was conceptualised from a monolingual approach. This study indicates that there is a need for more mandatory university courses related to multilingualism. It is also recommended that future research not only focus on teacher educators but also class teachers and their work by doing e.g., ethnographic research. Lastly, Swedish-speaking Finns’ perspective should also be examined.