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…

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.…

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…

The ability to express oneself clearly in both a mother tongue and a foreign language is a foundation principle of the new national curriculum in Estonia. Therefore, research was conducted to determine whether there was a possible relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' perceptions of effective teaching and the…

Knowledge of derivational morphology is considered an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge both in L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (second or foreign language) English language learning. However, it is still not clear whether different derivational affixes vary in their (learning) difficulty. The present study examines whether Bauer and Nation's…

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure…

This paper seeks to situate Estonian language use and policy within the emerging field of critical language policy and planning (CLPP) by investigating the discourses that frame linguistic behaviour. This done by way of an analysis of a series of interviews carried out with key actors in language policy in Estonia. The discourses framing language…

Ethnic identification is closely tied to language. Society's appreciation of one's first language and the opportunity to use it may help strengthen ethnic identification. This research examined the relationship between ethnic identifications and school language and investigated other factors that potentially impact language-minority students'…

The aim of the study was to demonstrate the style of text language used by Finnish pre-teen texters (n = 65) and determine how their text language related to their traditional literacy skills, and compare descriptively these results with earlier results from work with young English texters. Three kinds of text messages (natural texts, elicited…