Language learning is an important necessity of today's globalized society. Therefore, it is vital to provide the most effective methods for learning a foreign language. Through understanding how foreign language learning, cognitive load theory, learning modalities, and participants' physiological sex relate to one another, more effective…

The topic of language awareness in intercultural music education has received surprisingly little attention in discussions on meaningful and responsive musical practices, despite language being an ubiquitous issue that every music educator encounters when entering a multilingual learning environment. This study explores a language-aware…

This article scrutinises the normalised realities behind integration policies and training for refugees and immigrants that are claimed to be inclusive. The 'great narrative' of Finland has been focused on equal opportunity via education and training, which makes it even more important to examine the hidden realities and how such realities affect…

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…

A challenging aspect of foreign language acquisition is learning new vocabulary. Research has demonstrated the benefits of motor action to vocabulary learning, though these findings are rarely translated into teaching and learning practices. In this work, we present a novel paradigm for vocabulary learning in a virtual reality environment,…

Adult Arab learners of Finnish as second language (FSL) often encounter communication difficulty when dealing with official documents. They also cannot help their children in their school homework. FSL proficiency is an essential requirement to get an employment and to obtain the Finnish citizenship. The aim of this paper is to explore the use of…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Võro in Estonia, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools,…

This study investigated what log files can reveal about learner behaviour of low- and non-literate adults learning to read for the first time in Finnish as a second language. The participants' reading development was supported by practising in an online training environment. Log files, automatically created user-computer interaction records, were…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Udmurt, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

This study investigated adult cochlear implant users' (n == 39) vowel recognition and confusions by an open-set syllable test during 4 years of implant use, in a prospective repeated-measures design. Subjects' responses were coded for phoneme errors and estimated by the generalized mixed model. Improvement in overall vowel recognition was highest…

Publishing in the Sami languages has always been difficult. The Sami are currently spread across four countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. There are nine different Sami languages, some of them with only a few speakers. The Sami publishing industry is entirely dependent on government funding as it does not have its own funds nor is there…

The research presented in this dissertation examined changes in brain activity associated with learning, forgetting and using a second language. The first experiment investigated the changes that occur when novice adult second language learners acquire and forget second language words. Event-related brain potentials were measured while native…