Session Information
31 SES 14 B, How Do Learners Experience and Negotiate the Language Classroom Environment
Paper Session
Contribution
Swedish and Finnish are the official languages of Finland according to the constitution. In Finland the most popular language immersion programme is the Early Swedish Immersion (ESI). This approach has been adapted to Finland from the Early French Immersion programme that was developed in Canada in the 1960’s. ESI has been an attractive alternative for children of Finnish-speaking families for over 30 years in Finland. Despite this fairly long history, only a few minor studies have been conducted with a specific focus on immersion teachers instructional strategies in early childhood education settings. The aim of this paper is to describe different instructional strategies preschool teachers use in order to support the communication and language acquisition of 3-6-year-old children. Altogether nine different teacher-led activities were video recorded in four different preschools in Finland. The data was analysed by content analysis.
In all of the Nordic countries as well as in Europe we have seen a rapid increase in the number of different languages spoken in early childhood education contexts. A widely agreed notion today is that bilingualism and multilingualism are important capital in the globalised world. Being able to speak different languages enables wider communication and understanding across countries and people. However, there is variance in how different Nordic countries (as well as in Europe) support early language learning, which may even reflect ideological differences toward languages and language teaching (García, 2009; Garvis, Harju-Luukkainen, Flynn, 2018). On the basis of national steering documents Garvis, Harju-Luukkainen & Flynn (2018) argue that Finland can be seen as a country with a language ideology that gives larger possibilities for early language learning compared to Sweden, for instance. Further, they also argue that it is important for policymakers to consider the role of immersion programmes in early childhood services and at school. The purposes of the programmes need to be discussed, and there is a need for clear plans and guidelines for how to support bilingual and multilingual development during early childhood and the primary years of schooling.
In the Finnish context the different language learning possibilities during early childhood education are described in related steering documents. While we can find today various immersion or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes in Finland, the most popular one is Early Swedish Immersion (ESI). Its roots lie in French as second language education in Canada and further in Early French Immersion that was developed in St. Lambert in the 1960s (see also d’Anglejan & Tucker 1971; Baker, 2006).
Most of the ESI-related research in Finland has been linguistically oriented (see Harju-Luukkainen, 2013). Yet, also a pedagogical perspective is needed for exploring, interpreting and understanding the ESI contexts and settings. From these premises we have formulated the following research question: What kind of instructional strategies (verbal or non-verbal) do preschool teachers use in order to support the communication situations with 3-6-year old children? Further, we also investigate what instructional strategies teachers use in order to support children’s language production in the immersion language. In order to answer these questions, nine different teacher-led activities were video recorded in four different preschool classes in Finland. The data was analysed by means of content analysis.
Method
The data analysed in this study consists of nine video recordings, each ranging from 10 to 18 minutes. The data was collected at four different preschools in Helsinki and Espoo in Finland during the spring term (one preschool) and in autumn (three preschools) in 2015. The children in the preschool groups were between 3-6 years of age. All of them had been involved in the language immersion setting for less than three years, some of them only for a few months. Therefore, all of the participating children needed a lot of support from the teachers in any communication situations in Swedish, both for comprehension and language production. For this reason, video recording was preferred to mere audio, as it gave us better possibilities to interpret the pedagogical settings and related strategies teachers use, non-verbal communication included. The videos were recorded during ordinary daily activities led by the teachers. Content analysis examines patterns and structures from textual data. It selects out the key features that researchers want to pay attention to, develops categories and aggregates them into perceptual constructs in order to grasp the meaning (Gray & Densten, 1998). According to Weber (1990), content analysis may address language, content meaning, techniques of communication, specific events, or all of these simultaneously. In this research the specific focus was on the instructional strategies teachers use, both verbal and non-verbal. Because such strategies may not be self-explanatory or explicitly evident, an interpretive approach to the data was needed. Therefore we decided to use interpretive content analysis (for closer description, see Drisko & Maschi, 2015). Within these guidelines, the gathered video material was transcribed to make sense of the whole, to learn “what is going on” in the communication situations (Bengtsson, 2016). After this the data was analysed by content analysis with an inductive approach and breaking down the material into small meaning units (see Bengtsson, 2016). Any kinds of instructional strategies (verbal or non-verbal) that the teacher used were identified and categorised from the data. Next, the resulting categories were analysed further. Content analysis combined with categorising helped us identify different strategies used by the teachers.
Expected Outcomes
The results indicate that ESI teachers use a wide variety of different instructional strategies in supporting the language acquisition in the ESI context. Accordingly, teachers helped children in acquiring the immersion language by means of various visual materials, body language or gestures, tone of voice, routines and repetition in its many forms. Important elements in this acquisition process included songs, rhymes and teacher’s talk around the learning object while the teacher was also ensuring that everyone had understood what to do and how to react. The teachers sought to support children’s language production in various ways. For example a teacher could whisper the right answer, give a corresponding Swedish word when the children were talking in Finnish, make children repeat what they just had heard as well as make sure everyone understood the newly introduced word. Another common practice was the repetition of a child’s talk with a very positive tone of voice. This was used in way of positive feedback on children’s Swedish language production and to repeat their utterances in correct form (indirect correction). The findings of this study are in line with previous studies indicating that teachers’ use a variety of strategies when supporting both the communication and children’s own production of the immersion language. The results also indicate that we still have a very limited understanding of the immersion pedagogy, because many of the methods are not necessarily used consciously by the teachers and may remain implicitly expressed or enacted. This means that the methods are difficult to detect in the communication situations. This study also gave an indication that teachers attempt to adjust their communicational level as well as methods used according to the children’s linguistic level. However, here further studies are needed.
References
Baker, C. (2011). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. García, O. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Garvis, S., Harju-Luukkainen, H. & Flynn, T. (2018). A descriptive study of early childhood education steering documents in Finland, Sweden and Australia around language immersion programmes. Asia Pacific Journal of Research in Early Childhood Education, 12 (3), 1-22. d’Anglejan, A. & Tucker, G.R. (1971). Academic Report: The St. Lambert program of Home School Language Switch. The Modern Language Journal, 55, 99-101. Harju-Luukkainen, H. (2013). Kielikylpy Suomessa varhaiskasvatuksen kentällä - Mihin suunta tulevaisuudessa? (Language immersion in the field of Early Childhood Education. What is the direction for future?) Journal of Early Childhood Education Research, 2(1), 2-23 Gray, J. H., and Densten, I. L.,1998. Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis using Latent and Manifest Variables. Quality & Quantity, 32, 419-31. Weber, R. (1990). Basic content analysis (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Drisko, J. & Maschi, T. (2015). Content analysis. Pocket guide to social work research methods. Oxford University Press Inc. Bengtsson, M. (2016). How to plan and perform a qualitative study using content analysis. NursingPlus Open, 2, 8-14.
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