As Northern Europe is becoming increasingly multilingual, new challenges are posed to public institutions. In Finland, schools have not yet managed to turn students’ multilingual resources into an advantage. The Finnish national core curriculum of basic education (The Finnish National Agency for Education 2014) encourages a language aware school culture and mentions the parallel use of different languages in the school. However, the use and definition of these concepts are vague, and it is not clear how they should be implemented in schools. Teachers' attitudes may also be strongly driven by monolingual ideology (Alisaari et al. 2019), which is not conducive to promoting everyday multilingualism in classrooms. According to recent studies (Suuriniemi 2021, Repo 2022, Alisaari et al. 2023), linguistically responsive teaching (e.g. Lucas & Villegas 2013) and practices supporting multilingual learning have not yet become mainstream in Finnish comprehensive education, even if many teachers express both the need and the positive attitude (Harju-Autti & Sinkkonen, 2020) towards acquiring new teaching methods for their linguistically diverse classrooms. These questions are not only specific to Finland or the Nordic countries, but to all Western countries with recent increase in immigration. 

Educational system and especially basic and upper secondary education have a key role in integrating young people into the society, by providing qualifications for transition to working life, and by creating a sense of belonging and possibilities for democratic participation and agency in the Finnish society. The PISA results have shown that the learning outcomes of students with an immigrant background are remarkably lower than those of students with a Finnish background (Harju-Luukkainen et al. 2014). My presentation will investigate the individual and structural challenges multilingual students with migrant background face. Effective school language learning is key to academic success, but Finnish educational system does not seem to promote a truly multilingual society, where all the language resources of individuals are treated as an asset rather than an obstacle. Supporting the students’ individual identities calls for valuing their previous knowledge, including their language skills (Alisaari et al. 2023, Cummins, 2021).

The languages of the students are present in the classroom in one way or another, whatever agreement was made between the teacher and the students regarding their use. Research about the importance and means of pedagogical translanguaging (Cenoz & Gorter 2022) are still scarce in the Finnish school context. My research investigates the everyday realities of multilingualism at the Finnish educational system, specifically teacher’s perceptions on supporting multilingual learning. My research asks, 1) how do teachers see their role in supporting multilingual students’ linguistic and academic development, and 2) how are these ideas promoted in everyday classroom practices in linguistically diverse 9th grade classrooms? This study will give new knowledge on how to promote truly multilingual learning in linguistically diverse classrooms, where the teacher typically is a native speaker of the school language. 

The presentation at hand is part of the second sub-study of my dissertation Multilingual transitions – Post-comprehensive educational choices of multilingual pupils with migrant background. In this study I focused on subject teachers’ perceptions and means of supporting their multilingual student’s learning. The ethnographic research data of this study were produced in two lower secondary schools in the Metropolitan Helsinki area. Both schools have a large amount of non-native Finnish speakers as students, and they are situated in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. The data consist of field notes on multilingual pedagogic practices during one school year (59 observed schooldays) and individual interviews of 27 lower secondary subject teachers and other school staff such as special education teachers, career counselors, principals and multilingual counselors. My presentation will provide some preliminary results on the analysis that focuses on the teachers’ views. The interviews have been analyzed by using qualitative content analysis (Krippendorff, 1980).

Based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted for this study, I argue that even linguistically diverse Finnish schools lack systematic practices in supporting multilingual students’ learning. Many teachers spoke mostly English for newly arrived students and even well-known linguistically responsive methods were not found in everyday classroom practices. Students were rarely encouraged to use their languages in class and multilingual pedagogies were not familiar to most of the teachers interviewed. However, certain teachers used these methods regularly and verbalized the significance of these practices in the interviews. These teachers were dedicated to including all students in learning, both in the content matter but also socially. They had consciously developed their teaching in linguistically responsive direction and acknowledged their students’ languages as resources for learning. In my presentation I will present established practices of multilingual pedagogies and discuss policy recommendations for education.

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