This article undermines the actuality of a strict boundary between language and materiality by presenting verbal charms ("puheged," "vajhed"/"pakitas" in Vepsian) among Veps, an Indigenous minority group of Northwest Russia. Vepsian verbal charms are ritualized ways of speaking that are customarily used to prompt a…

Through detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course 'Academic reading' offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign…

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…

The aim of the study was to examine which predictor variables are related to literacy skills among monolingual Swedish (n = 269) and bilingual Finnish-Swedish (n = 229) children at the first grade in the Swedish-speaking schools in Finland. The participants were assessed in phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN),…

This paper explores language teacher identity (LTI) among three preschool teachers. The focus lies on the preschool teachers' identities as linguistic role models by means of analysing their own descriptions of language learning, that is, their personal experiences of and reflections on language acquisition. Three interviews were made with…

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…

This article critically examines the discourses concerning historical and transnational linguistic and cultural diversity in the semiotic landscape of a new teacher education building in Norway. In 2020, this building, housing the Department of Education, opened at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in the city of Tromsø. Designing,…

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…

Few studies provide information on the reliability and validity of parental report instruments when assessing the language skills of pre-school-aged children. This study investigates the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the parental report instrument, the Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory III (FinCDI III),…

This comparative curricular study examines the educational functions of the Swedish Sámi nomad school curricula before and after a central school reform in the 1960s. Due to the reform, the nomad school, a boarding school system for the Indigenous Sámi people in Sweden, was formed to bring about systemic changes in the education of Sámi children,…

In this longitudinal study, we examined what kind of profiles of reading fluency and spelling skills could be identified among pupils (N = 467) and how stable these profiles were during the first three years of school. We also investigated how monolingual (Swedish) and simultaneously bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) pupils and gender were distributed…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the time course of vocal development in infants and toddlers with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs; bilateral CI group) who are acquiring Finnish and to compare their progress to that of infants with normal hearing and typical development (TD group). Method: Five thousand nine hundred…