This paper presents the findings of a survey on research activities and research cultures across the CercleS network. The survey was conducted under the auspices of the CercleS Focus Group on Leadership and Management and aimed to explore the scope of research in Language Centres; the links between institutional factors such as staff contracts and…

Learner engagement has been the focus of a growing amount of research in recent years both in general educational psychology and the field of second language acquisition (SLA). However, while recent contributions on learner engagement in language classrooms have provided valuable insights, the field is still only at the early stages of…

Linguistic diversity is growing in Higher Education, driven by factors like internationalization and digitalization. This trend necessitates a reevaluation of language practices within academic communities. Language Centres play a crucial role in modelling effective practices and reshaping these practices to address the multilingual needs of…

This exploratory mixed data study investigated the role of technology in adult migrant language and late literacy education in Finland. In addition to an online pre-pandemic survey targeted at Finnish language and literacy teachers, four inservice teachers were interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020. With means of qualitative…

High self-efficacy beliefs and effective self-regulatory strategies are increasingly important in academic settings, and especially in developing academic writing skills. This article deals with how students develop academic writing skills in two different pedagogical settings (as autonomous learners and in a traditional learning environment), and…

Curricular reform requires Finnish schools to be language aware and promote instruction that builds on students' linguistic resources. However, knowledge about students' experiences related thereto remains scarce. To create understanding about linguistic integration in increasingly multilingual schools, this study quantitatively explores the…

Culture teaching in a foreign language (FL) classroom involves linguistic and cultural knowledge about the target culture as well as pedagogical skills of integrating these into classroom practice. In general, more attention should be paid to culture teaching methods in FL teacher education in order to move from the traditional, teacher-centred…

This study investigates the physical literacy environment of preschools in three Nordic countries. The environments were assessed using an observation protocol in a total of 131 classrooms with children aged between one and seven in Sweden, Norway and Finland. The results showed that children's books were common and accessible in all three…

This research presents a virtual exchange project between two tertiary institutions in New Zealand and Finland with 26 participants who were intermediate German language students. During the project, the students used a closed Facebook group to post about given topics; the posts combined video, audio, and text that adhered to multimodal…

Although national and EU policies and recommendations encourage varied language learning, English has ruled as the most studied foreign language, while other languages are decreasingly being studied in basic and upper secondary education in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of this development in practice.…

English-speaking learners of L2 Spanish who were taking part in a four-week study abroad program in Spain and Japanese-speaking learners of L2 English who were individually studying in year-long abroad experiences participated in the present study. Quantitative and qualitative data from language questionnaires and contact profiles along with…

This article examines the long-term effects of CLIL on former pupils' foreign language and intercultural attitudes. The 24 participants, who received English-medium CLIL for nine years in the 1990s, were interviewed and the data analyzed using thematic analysis. The participants generally felt that CLIL had had a very positive effect on their…

Elective language courses, particularly those starting from the beginner level, constitute their own special group within the communication and language course offerings of universities. The elementary courses of less commonly taught languages (LCTL), such as Japanese, provide students with the opportunity to acquire, among other benefits, a…

Living in learning societies encourages learning outside the classroom. Alongside this reality, higher education institutions have been incorporating policies and procedures that support recognition of prior learning (RPL). This development means establishing adequate RPL assessment practices. Our empirical study at the Aalto University Language…

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is an emerging field of research that focusses on how information and communication technologies (ICT) are applied in language teaching and learning. CALL lies at the intersection of several other independent fields of study, i.e. technology, education, and linguistics. The aim of this study is to…