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,…

Linguistic diversity emerging from international student mobility, in non-anglophone universities, is typically eclipsed by the existing tensions between the national language(s) and English as 'Lingua franca'. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with university lecturers, this study highlights the tensions surrounding national…

Sweden is often commended for the inclusion of home languages in the formal education system: both mother tongue instruction (where a pupil's home language is taught as an optional school subject) and study guidance (where a pupil is given content support in their home language or prior language of schooling) are offered. Still, while many…

This article aims to explore and clarify how students' use of first and second languages in a translanguaging science classroom (TSC) may affect the continuity of learning in science. In a TSC, participants can use all available language resources, in all meaning-making situations. An ethnographic data collection and research design is used to…

Purpose: The aim is to analyse linguistic aspects of education in Social Sciences for L2 students. Method: Linguistic ethnography is used for studying the hybridity of Social Sciences with material from nine lesson observations and interviews with three teachers. Findings: Findings showed that students' earlier experiences, knowledge, and…

This article is aimed to demonstrate how language policy at the local school level may create space for translanguaging. Focus is on a Mother Tongue (MT) classroom for Somali in a primary school in Sweden by way of an analysis of layers of language policy, with focus on spatial aspects. The empirical material consists of policy documents,…

This article concerns how teachers can use physical artefacts as mediating means to support emergent bilingual students' learning in science class. The data consist of non-participant observations in a Swedish 3rd grade (9-10 years old) class working with electricity. All students were bilingual, but in different minority languages and the teacher…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

Finland is constitutionally bilingual and there are several small minority languages. With recent migration from different parts of the world, the linguistic environment has become even more diversified. National curricula take linguistic diversity among the pupils into consideration and stress the importance of supporting pupils' language…

Conceptualizations of English as standard, as a lingua franca, or as part of translingual practice form part of the discourses surrounding its use in EMI. While researchers generally agree that the 'E' in EMI should not stand for native varieties of standard English, the stakeholders' perceptions of English call for further research. This paper…

Both Sweden and Finland have education systems promoting equity and equality. However, recent societal and political changes linked to increased immigration have created new challenges in efforts to support linguistic diversity. This paper aims to explore how multilingualism is represented in the national compulsory school curricula in the two…

Using the first language (L1) to solve problems in understanding the second language (L2) may be beneficial for L2 learning. However, the overuse of L1 may deprive L2 learners of exposure to the L2. It appears that the question is not whether to use L1 or L2; it is when and how each language can be used to support L2 learning. This study focuses…

This study sought to explore the ideological and implementational spaces for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies (MPs) in initial teacher education (ITE) policies and curricula across the European Union. The concept of linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to examine inclusive, equity-centred MPs in ITE. A multi-sited…

This article examines multilingual interactions in an upper secondary Language Introduction Programme (LIP) classroom in Sweden. The LIPs, highly affected by both glocal linguistic and cultural diversity and the monolingual-monocultural habitus of the surrounding society, offer recently arrived immigrant youth (ages 16-19) education where emphasis…

As a result of internationalisation, many universities in northern Europe have adopted English as a medium of instruction. At the same time, recent language policies have reinforced the importance of the national language(s) in the academic domain. Parallel language use was introduced and institutionalised in order to ensure students' right to…