This study examines how practitioners of minority-medium Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Finland reflect on language awareness (LA) in their professional learning communities (PLCs). The study is conducted within in-service training for ECEC practitioners and it also highlights how these practitioner reflections can be of use and support developing future in-service training within the action research framework. The data include nine group discussions on a reflection task, with 41 primary participants and 165 secondary participants from each primary participant’s respective PLC. As a starting point, the researcher-trainers identified six language-policy themes on LA in national policy documents. These were presented for practitioners, who then discussed them both in their respective PLCs and within the in-service training. The in-service discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed for qualitative-content analysis. During the analysis, the focus was on the dynamics of minority-majority positions, with the following themes emerging: i) Language contacts; ii) bilingual children and multi-layered identity; and iii) developing multilingual pedagogies. The results showed that the same insights often were treated both as strengths and weaknesses, and that a need exists for support so that practitioners can implement language-aware educational policy into their operational cultures.
The development of the Internet and digital tools for interaction has enabled computer-mediated communication as part of the communicative approach to language learning and teaching. This creates affordances for learners of any target language from any location to communicate with each other, for example, through tandem language learning – that is, reciprocal two-way learning in dyads of two students with different first languages. Previous studies on tandem learning have mainly focused on the interaction between tandem partners in informal learning situations. In this study, we explore the teacher’s role in virtual classroom tandem applied to curriculum-based language teaching. The aim is to describe teachers’ engagement in interactional situations in the classroom, including the interplay between the physical classroom and virtual learning environments (VLEs). The data comprise video and screen recordings of teacher activities and interactions. The results reveal that virtual classroom tandem is a strongly student-centred approach where the teacher interaction during tandem lessons is notably narrower compared with tandem language learning based entirely on face-to-face meetings in a formal school context and in classroom instruction generally.
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