Browsing by Author "Maaninka Ek, Jessica"

The multilingual turn has reached also Finnish schools, as more and more students speak other languages than the native language Finnish (or Swedish or Sámi) as their mother tongue. In the field of study, they are called F2-students, which refers to Finnish as a second language subject. Many F2-students has lived in Finland since they were born, and others may be recently moved here. They all are still multilingual students. When they participate to Finnish pre-primary school or primary school, they will start to learn literacy in Finnish. Regardless of the pupils’ mother tongues, similar Finnish assessment material is usually used to survey the student’s literacy readiness. In this research the goal was to find out what kind of assessment materials and means of inquiry teachers have used to examine the literacy readiness of their multilingual, F2-students and what kind of experiences teachers have about using those materials. The goal was also to find out what kind of developmental needs the teachers regard as necessary, as they gain information about their students’ literacy readiness. The research was implemented by qualitative research, and it also had features of design-based research. The research material was collected by qualitative methods, with questionnaire and semi-structured theme interviews. 25 respondents participated the research by answering the questionnaire. In addition, two pre-primary teachers, one kindergarten director and two special education teachers were interviewed. The research materials were analyzed by content analysis and thematic analysis. The participants of the research had experiences about many different assessment materials for literacy readiness. In addition to the assessment materials or instead of them teachers had also used many other optional ways to survey literacy readiness from F2-students. Alongside the working and positive factors teachers brought up some needs for development. Those developmental needs were about the contents of the assessment materials, and how to use them. They also thought that the teachers who do assess literacy readiness from pupils, should know more about multilingualism, literacy development and how to support these factors. Based on findings of this research, it is obvious that the teachers would like to have a new tool to examine literacy readiness. Optimally, the new tool should take into consideration all the different fields of literacy readiness. It should also contain a part for practicing skills for literacy.