Text comprehension comprises processes that work interactively to create a situation model of a text. Three hundred and one students from 12 Estonian schools were assessed to examine the relations between vocabulary and different text comprehension levels and to detect students' individual profiles in these skills. Both variable- and…

In this paper, the experiences and views of 16-year-old high school students are explored regarding their perceived agency in school related contexts in an ethnically and culturally segregated post-soviet school system in Estonia. Eight focus group interviews were conducted in spring 2021 with 37 students in schools with Estonian and Russian as…

This article focuses on the concept of "letter" in oral folklore. The main research material is examples from the older folk songs of Seto, where a letter, a book and other items referring to literacy are mentioned. Texts under consideration are poetical and the meaning conveyed in them is not always very clear. The term…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…

Despite Estonia being ranked among the highest performing nations in the world-wide testing of students, these encouraging results are somewhat overshadowed by the challenge to overcome the divided school system with different languages of learning that impacts crucially on students' social, academic and professional paths. The study examines…

This article explores how teacher agency support, students' perseverance and work experience outside of school are related to student agency in the context of Estonia, where Estonian and Russian-speaking students are often educated separately in schools with either Estonian or Russian instructional language. The student-level data (n = 9060) were…

This case study presents the Estonian open access online platform Education on Screen. So far, the platform features two educational projects: Literature on Screen and History on Screen. Both projects are aimed at secondary school students and are balanced between a thorough treatment of a single film and a universal framework for discussing the…

This article interrogates the meaning of marginalisation by comparing two non-dominant language communities in Europe, and in particular their language education and teachers. An interdisciplinary exploration of the marginalisation leads the authors to identify key aspects and expressions of the concept. The authors illuminate these broad…

Derivational morphology (DM) and how it can be assessed have been investigated relatively rarely in language learning and testing research. The goal of this study is to add to the understanding of the nature of DM knowledge, exploring whether and how it is separable from vocabulary breadth. Eight L2 (second or foreign language) English DM…

This study investigates civic and citizenship education in a unique post-Communist context--in the bilingual education system of Estonia. Estonia continues to have a bilingual school system where there are Estonian and Russian language schools in parallel. While Estonian language school students are ranked very high in international comparisons,…

This study investigates civic and citizenship education in a unique post-Communist context--in the bilingual education system of Estonia. Estonia continues to have a bilingual school system where there are Estonian and Russian language schools in parallel. While Estonian language school students are ranked very high in international comparisons,…

The article seeks to answer four questions: (1) How different are the value worlds in the Estonian- and German-language songbooks used in Estonia 1860-1914? (2) To what extent do the value worlds of songbooks express the ideals of the Wandervogel movement? (3) What is the position of wandering among other values? (4) Is the representation of…

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants' and toddlers' communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children's communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The…

The term 'new speaker' has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the different types of speaker profiles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in…

This article explores policy and pedagogical pliability as strategies for perpetuating and protecting regional languages, like Võro, in the twenty-first century. The concept of pliability, as I develop it in this article, refers to the flexibility and adaptability of policies that are free from prescriptive and strict mandates. By examining this…