The topic of language awareness in intercultural music education has received surprisingly little attention in discussions on meaningful and responsive musical practices, despite language being an ubiquitous issue that every music educator encounters when entering a multilingual learning environment. This study explores a language-aware…

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),…

Derivational morphology (DM) and how it can be assessed have been investigated relatively rarely in language learning and testing research. The goal of this study is to add to the understanding of the nature of DM knowledge, exploring whether and how it is separable from vocabulary breadth. Eight L2 (second or foreign language) English DM…

Curricular reform requires Finnish schools to be language aware and promote instruction that builds on students' linguistic resources. However, knowledge about students' experiences related thereto remains scarce. To create understanding about linguistic integration in increasingly multilingual schools, this study quantitatively explores 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…

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…

In the present study we investigate empirically how six to seven-year-old children with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics of a children's song from Finnish to English, analyzing how translation is collaboratively constituted by the participants. The study is informed by translanguaging theory and a sociocultural…

This study investigates how 6- to 7-year-old children in a bilingual preschool together with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics to a children's song from Finnish to English. With an interest in how translation activities can engage children in communication and metacommunication, and facilitate the development of…

Sápmi is a geographical area that runs across the Kola Peninsula in Russia to northern Finland, Norway and Sweden. All Sami languages have been going through a rapid language change process and many of the traditional language domains have disappeared during the last decades due to previous national and local language policies. Nevertheless,…

Conceptual grammatical knowledge is an area which causes problems at different levels of education. This article examines the ideas of conceptual change theory as a basis for establishing a new grammar teaching method. The research strategy which I use is educational design research and the research data have been collected from teacher students…