Browsing by Subject "EFL teachers"

The Finnish school of today is multilingual. Students have several different mother tongues and speak other languages in different situations. The National Core Curriculum for Basic Education requires schools and teachers to practice language awareness and promote multilingualism. The aim of this study is to find out how, according to EFL teachers in Helsinki, multilingualism is taken into consideration in schools and in their own teaching. The research has a qualitative approach, and it was conducted by using semi-structured interviews to collect the data. Five teachers in two lower secondary schools in Helsinki were interviewed, and qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results of this study show that schools offer language awareness training for their teachers and activities for the students. Teachers practice language awareness actively in their classrooms and accommodate speakers of different languages when planning their teaching. Teachers create differentiated teaching and testing material, use comparison of languages, allow, and encourage the use of other languages in the classroom, seek help from special needs teachers, digital experts, applications, and differentiated books. The challenges they face have to do with lack of resources and time. One of the main challenges in the English classroom is created by the notable differences in competence where differentiation is needed for all students, not only multilingual students. The study shows that language awareness in schools is in a constant state of development, and practicing language awareness and multilingualism is slowly becoming the norm.