A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The…

This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students' use of "and"-prefaced turns when doing meaning-focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English-as-a-foreign-language upper-secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving…

The development of videoconferencing technology has enabled new modes of combining in-person and remote teaching. In this article, we investigate interactional practices in hybrid language classrooms that combine on-site and remote participation by way of telepresence technology. Telepresence robots are videoconferencing tools that can be remotely…

In this empirical study, we analyse how five-year-old children are socialised into particular interpretive practices indicative of a literate mind. The data come from translation activities where children with their teacher listen to and then talk about how to understand the lyrics to a popular children's song. The setting is a Finnish-Swedish…

This study examined student teachers' beliefs about teaching multilingual classrooms across three European contexts; Slovenia, Spain (Catalonia), and Finland. Research shows that teachers' confidence in handling linguistically diverse classrooms is lacking. Linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to explore different expressions…

The notion of content and language integration has recently become a key topic of inquiry in research on content and language integrated learning and other kinds of bilingual educational programmes. Understanding what integration is and how it happens is of fundamental importance not only for researchers interested in gauging the possibilities and…

With increasing mobility of people across the world, there is a pressing need to develop evidence-based teaching practices that lead to high-quality education, which serves the needs of inclusive societies and social and epistemic justice. This book presents cutting-edge qualitative case-study research across a range of educational contexts,…

This study investigates how 6- to 7-year-old children in a bilingual preschool together with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics to a children's song from Finnish to English. With an interest in how translation activities can engage children in communication and metacommunication, and facilitate the development of…

As policy agents, teachers are involved in representing and reproducing language education policies in their talk, practices and classroom interaction. Contemporary Finland and its education system are experiencing times of change from the increased globalisation and dynamic flows of migration. This has affected the most recent Finnish curriculum…

After reviewing the concepts of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Translanguaging, this article presents an exploratory study of translanguaging in CLIL contexts. Employing illustrative extracts from a collection of CLIL classroom recordings in Austria, Finland and Spain, we argue that both pedagogic and interpersonal motivations…

The aim of this paper is to outline classroom tandem by comparing it with informal tandem learning contexts and other language instruction methods. Classroom tandem is used for second language instruction in mixed language groups in the subjects of Finnish and Swedish as L2. Tandem learning entails that two persons with different mother tongues…

The present study explores the ways in which peers take up a teacher-like discourse to enforce normative uses of language in a classroom, effectively socializing one another to the institutional use of English which in turn signals class membership. Such an uptake of teacher-like discourses and practices can be characterized as subteaching…

Using a pragmatic framework, this paper examines how directives are performed by teachers and students in Finnish and Austrian CLIL classrooms, that is settings where a foreign language (in this case English) is used as the medium of instruction in non-language subjects such as history or chemistry. We explore how interpersonal aspects of…

This paper analyses classroom discourse in Finnish EFL classrooms where English is the object of study and content-based (Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)) classrooms where non-language subjects are taught in English. The students in both groups are Finnish teenagers. Approaching the data from a discourse-pragmatic perspective, the…