Browsing by Subject "Finnish as a second language"
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(2016)In The United States there has been developed a system to divide immigrant generations into different categories to clarify the statistics and to provide information about integration and language skills. Generations are divided into seven different categories. The second generation is divided into generations 2,0 and 2,5. The 2,5 generation, children of international partnerships are in my special interest and my research subject. In studies it have been found that the 2,5 generation's position is weaker in their own mother tongue teaching than the 2,0 generation's position. Finnish as a second language seem to be not so important for generation 2,5. Parents' language choices and the child's mother tongue registration was instead in a crucial role in supporting multilingualism and multicultural identity both at home and at school. The aim of my Master's Thesis was to study the language choices of families and the reasons for these choices, different mother tongue education participation and the role of the school and the kindergarten in supporting the multilingual and multicultural identity. I carried out the Master's Thesis as a qualitative case study. I interviewed five international family's mothers by the theme interview method. The purpose was to obtain information on children's lingual pathways from early childhood to the present day and how the parents' language choices impact to these pathways as well as how the school and day care center offer support in this process. I analyzed the data by narrative analysis method. The family language choices were affected by the family's own decisions, activity of the relatives and environmental attitudes. In this casestudy especially mothers were active in supporting multilingualism. Finnish skills were quite good, so there was no need to the Finnish as a second language teaching. There was only one family, whose children had participated from the beginning to the teaching of the mother tongue and they were also the only one whose mother tongues were equally strong and who felt that the school and the kindergarten have been actively supporting multilingualism. 2,5-generation children's language resources are valuable capital for both the individual and society in general. Parents also need more support and encouragement in order to use the valuable language resources. The simplest would be the registration of all native languages instead of one and if the teaching of the mother tongue would be compulsory.
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(2011)Goals. Immigrant pupils are over-represented in special education. Linguistic difficulties are the most pivotal reasons for social exclusion of immigrant pupils during their school career. Addedly reading, writing, and language development disorders are the most common reasons for both part-time and extensive special education. I studied class teachers' perceptions of the typical linguistic difficulties of pupils who speak Finnish as their second language and of those who have dyslexia, because I suspect that telling the difference between linguistic competency in progress and the symptoms of dyslexia isn't easy. I look for overlappings in the perceptions of linguistic difficulties, their causes and their support measures, which would reveal the challenges in recognizing linguistic difficulties, which in turn might partly explain why immigrant pupils are over-represented in special education. Methods. This study was carried out as structured individual interviews with nine class teachers from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. To increase reliability, complementary information was gathered about the same phenomenon with a questionnaire that each interviewee filled out at the end of the interview. It was required that the interviewees have experience of teaching both dyslexic pupils and pupils who speak Finnish as a second language. The material analysis was mainly deductive, but the material that wasn't in line with the theoretical frame of reference was analyzed inductively. Results and conclusions. There were overlappings in the class teachers' perceptions of the linguistic difficulties, support measures fitting them and, based on the questionnaire results, also of the causes of these difficulties. Additionally all the interviewees said it to be difficult to recognize dyslexia in a pupil who speaks Finnish as a second language. I came to the conclusion that distinguishing different linguistic difficulties from one another is a challenge to which class teachers don't always feel competent to rise, which is why they consider the assistance of special teachers and other professionals beneficial.
Now showing items 1-2 of 2