Browsing by Author "Koivusalo, Nelli"

Multilingualism is a phenomenon which is increasingly visible in society. The number of persons who speak so called foreign languages in Finland has been clearly increasing every year and this can also be seen in the school institution. The demand and need for teaching students’ own languages has increased. The Finnish national curriculum (2014) for comprehensive schools emphasizes multilingualism, language awareness and importance of students’ mother tongue. The aim of this research is to clarify what is the situation of teaching mother tongue in the early 2020s. I examine teaching from the mother tongue teachers’ point of view. I am interested in how teachers teach the language and what things are important to the teachers in the teaching. This research is qualitative content analysis. The research material consisted of nine interviews from mother tongue language teachers. The interviews were semi-structural thematic interviews. The interviewees were four Russian teachers, a Japanese teacher, a Thai teacher, a Bulgarian teacher, a Dari teacher, and a Finnish teacher. The research material has been collected both from Finland and abroad. The material analysis method was content analysis. The interviews were transcribed and after that transcribed material was coded. As a result, I found four themes that teachers saw important in teaching mother tongue languages and five themes which seem to be otherwise important to the teachers in their job. The results of this research indicate that mother tongue language classes are usually based on the national curriculum, but it is sometimes hard to adapt same curriculum to all languages. Teaching is strongly influenced by learning material and there are huge differences in the availability between languages. According to this study teachers emphasize literacy skills, writing and master the letters of the language in their teaching. In the classes students are studying mostly independently because studying groups are strongly heterogeneous. Functional teaching methods have important place in classes because they are applicable for all the students regardless their age or language proficiency. Most of the teachers experience that it is challenging to evaluate the learning outcome in mother tongue language. In addition, the results of this research indicate that mother tongue teachers experience that important things in teaching are meaning of culture and identity, benefits of be able to use mother tongue, family’s support in studying mother tongue and valuation to their job. All in all, mother tongue language classes need assistance and resources in the early 2020s.