This paper describes the process of developing classroom culture that promotes reciprocal intercultural encountering in the primary school. Storycrafting, an oral storytelling method used for democratic encounters between participants, was used to connect classes in Scotland, Finland and Belgium over three cycles of design-based research.…

In this quasi-experimental study we examined how the Count How Many (CHM) intervention program can support multilingual children's early numeracy and oral language skills. The program is aimed at promoting spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) and early numeracy skills in 3- to 5-year-old children who attend day care. We examined the effects…

Purpose: This study reports on how very old (VO) Finnish people without dementia perform in the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and two verbal fluency tasks and which demographic factors predict the performance. Method: The study included fifty 80- to 100-year-old community-dwelling Finnish speakers with no dementing illnesses or speech-language…

This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students' use of "and"-prefaced turns when doing meaning-focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English-as-a-foreign-language upper-secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving…

The study explores Finnish compulsory school language teachers' formative and summative assessment practices. It aims at finding out what formative and summative assessment modes and tools the teachers use and what kind of evidence they collect for students' final grades. The data were gathered through questionnaires administered in national…

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of "I don't know" in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of…

Student engagement is essential in online language courses where the risk of suspending studies is higher than in face-to-face teaching. Furthermore, oral language rehearsal is challenging in such a course; therefore providing sufficient assignments to rehearse oral interaction is central. This study investigates how student engagement and oral…