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…

In the present study we investigate empirically how six to seven-year-old children with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics of a children's song from Finnish to English, analyzing how translation is collaboratively constituted by the participants. The study is informed by translanguaging theory and a sociocultural…

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…

This reflective practice will examine and report on students' experiences of three different bilingual (English-Spanish) task-based telecollaborative projects. The observations indicate that throughout these different projects the students were able to develop their intercultural awareness and their critical thinking skills via different online…

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…

Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers' agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic…

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher…

This study investigated the relationship between the English language competence of Finnish bilingual pupils and school-external factors such as parental expectations, home involvement, and exposure to English outside the classroom. Data on the pupils' language competence was collected from n?=?122 6th graders in bilingual education, and compared…

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…

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a term widely used in Europe to refer to different forms of content based education, often conducted in English. Earlier research on CLIL has tended to focus on matters of language learning or content mastery rather than on details of classroom interaction. This paper investigates how English is…