As policy agents, teachers are involved in representing and reproducing language education policies in their talk, practices and classroom interaction. Contemporary Finland and its education system are experiencing times of change from the increased globalisation and dynamic flows of migration. This has affected the most recent Finnish curriculum…

In this paper I will show the preliminary findings from my study of the discourse in synchronous written chats performed by students who study modern German literature within their first term of German studies. The focus of the study is on learning strategies and discourse strategies and how the Swedish learners make use of them when chatting with…

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…

A study compared the narrative structures in stories told by monolingual Swedish-speaking children (n=19) and Finnish-speaking immersion students of Swedish (n=19), all in fifth grade. The immersion students had been taught in immersion since kindergarten. Subjects each told a story based on a wordless picture book, which was then analyzed for a…

Comparison of free written compositions of 86 bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) and 86 monolingual (Swedish) third-, sixth-, and ninth-graders in a Finland Swedish comprehensive school revealed that bilinguals produced significantly more syntactic, vocabulary, and phraseology errors. Background variables correlating with errors included the student's…