Globalisation has resulted in European families that have a variety of home languages, leading to the need for heritage language learning (HLL). The purpose of HLL is to ensure that in addition to learning the language of their schools, children with migrant backgrounds also maintain their heritage language (HL). Besides the 'regular' teaching, in…

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 marks a significant shift in India's educational framework, particularly with its emphasis on multilingual education (MLE) and mother tongue-based instruction (MTI). Recognizing India's vast linguistic diversity, the policy advocates for teaching in the mother tongue or local language until at least Grade…

The aim of this study was to examine what kind of school performance and behaviour profiles could be identified among students in the final grade of basic education in the Swedish speaking parts of Finland (N = 1149, grade 9), how these differed in temperament and how temperament could explain profile differences in first language (L1, Swedish)…

Research on multilingualism in the home has approached the family as a fixed unit thus neglecting the dynamic view of the family and its intersection with family language practices. The present study aims to address this gap by focusing on Russian-speaking mothers in Finland who have raised their children bilingually in single-parent as well as in…

The current study builds an argument for using Vygotskian "perezhivanie" as a theoretical perspective to explore the becoming and being of family language policy (FLP). We shift the focus from the three components constituting FLP -- language beliefs or ideologies, language practices, and language planning or management -- to the…

This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both countries has undergone major changes in…

A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

Linguistic diversity is growing in Higher Education, driven by factors like internationalization and digitalization. This trend necessitates a reevaluation of language practices within academic communities. Language Centres play a crucial role in modelling effective practices and reshaping these practices to address the multilingual needs of…

During the past decade, the field of family language policy has broadened its scope and turned its attention to diverse family configurations in versatile sociolinguistic contexts. The current study contributes to this endeavor by focusing on two single-parent families who live in Finland and who strive to support Russian as a family language.…

This study explores the dialogical nature of agency when two immigrant pupils, who are learning Finnish as their new target language, are authoring their selves. Bakhtin's dialogism was the inspiration for this examination of the discourses that surround the L2 pupils' agency and how they respond to discourses through their agency.…

To educate multilingual global citizens and follow the multilingual turn in language education, universities are faced with the challenge of developing their language pedagogies. This article reports on a study conducted in the context of university language studies that take a multilingual perspective to learning languages for academic and…

The Sámi are indigenous people living in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. There are about 10,500 Sámi in Finland. The traditional settlement area of the Sámi is located in the Arctic. Endangered Inari, Skolt, and Northern Sámi languages are spoken in Finland, and efforts are made to implement the traditions, principles, and values of…

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),…

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…

The current Finnish core curriculum requires all teachers in basic education to be linguistically responsive. However, studies on the linguistically responsive practices used by teachers are scarce. The frequency with which teachers (N = 820) use 21 linguistically responsive practices was investigated through data that were gathered via an online…