Browsing by Subject "Monikielisyys"

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.

Background and Objectives: In today's world, multilingualism is more the rule than the exception. Successively multilingual children from immigrant backgrounds are more likely to be referred to speech therapist diagnostic tests and receive a relatively larger amount of support measures in kindergarten and school. This is often due to insufficient exposure to the target language, in which case age-level language skills are not achieved. Studies show that it is important to support the development of the second language at an early stage, especially with a focus on vocabulary, in order to enable successively multilingual children to have sufficient language skills before entering school. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the development of narrative skills of multilingual children before and after the small group language intervention and compare their development to children who did not participate in such intervention. This thesis is part of the MULTILINGUA research project. Subjects and methods: In this thesis, a research and control group of a total of 41 children eere selected from a larger sample of the Paula-research project. The children who participated in the study were all successively multilingual children with a foreign background whose first language and language spoken at home was other than Finnish, Swedish or Sámi. The children of the research group (n = 21) participated in weekly small group activities in the kindergarten for about six months. The aim of the small group intervention was to support the development of the Finnish language. There were no similar small group intervention in the kindergartens of the control group (n = 19). The development of narrative skills was assessed using the Kissatarina -test. Narrative skills were measured twice every six months. Key Findings and Discussion: The narrative skills of both the research and control groups developed during the six-month follow-up. Looking at both groups, the increase in both the mean length of the expression and the information score of the narrative between the initial and final measurements were statistically significant. When comparing the groups, a statistically significant difference was found only in the positive development of the information score of the narrative. The higher information scores of the final measurement were 24% explained by the background variables group (study) and the sex of the child (girl). The results of the study provided indications that small group intervention supports the development of Finnish-speaking narrative skills of multilingual children. In further research, the results could be analyzed more qualitatively and compared with monolingual children.